"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Wait.
You think Russia is invading Ukraine because it needs more land for its population?
Isn't it rather the opposite: that it needs more population for its land, given the Russian population has dropped from 148m to 143m, and their population pyramid is incredibly deeply (and perhaps irretrievably) fucked up.
Its the resources on that land, minerals etc as much as agriculture, also the Donbass Industry is quite critical to Russias economy (which is why the EU association agreement, with consequent customs restrictions was such a big deal for Russia).
Yes it increases Russias population but people wise the issue is about ethnic Russians who had been planted there during the days of the Russian Empire and USSR (just as the partition of Ireland was about such plantation issues).
I suspect something similar to the Ukraine War would have happened in Ireland before the 1920s were out, had home rule without partition been rammed through.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
I've just spoken to a friend in the USA. He's a Fortune 500 CEO and a direct descendent of Odin. He once climbed Everest by dragging himself up using only his arms, for the challenge. He didn't start at base camp, he started from a beach on the Arabian Sea. He is an accomplished chef and once made pancakes for His Holiness Pope Paul VI despite being just 6 months old at the time.
Anyway, he tells me he's 99.4% sure that Cristiano Ronaldo will score a left-footed flick from the edge of the penalty area in the 52nd minute, and will get booked for his celebrations.
There are probably worse bets than Portugal to win the Euros. As the Racing Post chap said, if your biggest problem is what to do with Cristiano Ronaldo, you haven't got many problems. But in the words of David Cameron, Come on, England!
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is reasonably amusing since the word "tundra" comes from Finnish
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
Indeed, as a working class Northerner I have no idea about poshos.
That’s a really good thread. Maybe we should all take note of this?
'Full data here with maps and all. Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.'
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
Indeed, as a working class Northerner I have no idea about poshos.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Wait.
You think Russia is invading Ukraine because it needs more land for its population?
Isn't it rather the opposite: that it needs more population for its land, given the Russian population has dropped from 148m to 143m, and their population pyramid is incredibly deeply (and perhaps irretrievably) fucked up.
As is Ukraine's of course, but simply absorbing them addresses Russia's issues for a time.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is genuinely news to me.
It depends whether you count "forestry" as "agriculture". Because that's pretty much all there is, a few km north of Helsinki
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
The version I heard was that a Tory candidate knocked on Lord Mountbatten’s door and he happened to be there to answer. She was taken aback and gushingly assumed that she could 'count on his vote.' ‘Actually I’m a socialist,’ he replied, ‘but I believe my butler votes for your lot. I’ll go and fetch him.’
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
Wait.
You think Russia is invading Ukraine because it needs more land for its population?
Isn't it rather the opposite: that it needs more population for its land, given the Russian population has dropped from 148m to 143m, and their population pyramid is incredibly deeply (and perhaps irretrievably) fucked up.
As is Ukraine's of course, but simply absorbing them addresses Russia's issues for a time.
Indeed: all of Eastern Europe's population pyramids look pretty fucked.
As, come to mention it, do most of the population pyramids in Western Europe, plus China, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
Fortunately, we have brilliant politicians who are here to explain the problem, and to talk about the options we have - working later, expecting less from the NHS. etc. This ensures that the election is fought on who is best placed to solved the challenges facing the country rather than something like... ahhh... trans rights.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Marina said not long ago ( I can't remember the interviewer) that she had never been a Conservative Party member and she had never attended a Conservative Party Conference. She is currently not a card carrying member of a Political Party, the only Party she has ever been a member of was Labour.
Johnson used to say, if he was conflicted as to what to do politically he would ask the Wheelers for their advice and do the Polar opposite.
Read this twice: Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
You're dealing with the political analyst who thought Liz Truss as PM would surprise on the upside.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
GDP is a poor measure of wellbeing anyway (especially when not measured per head). Big slews of it are made up of things like imputed rent (the amount of money that would be raised if every owner occupied house is rented out).
Something we do agree on!
Imputed rent is a slightly ridiculous concept which means that GDP grows when house prices go up because it means we'd all need to be paying more rent to live in our homes.
(Interestingly, in Switzerland, imputed rent is taxable income. They say that all assets should be treated equally. If you own a company, and it pays you a dividend, you pay tax on it. If you own a house and get a benefit in kind - i.e. living there - from that asset, then you should treat it as income. I.e. you shouldn't be tax disadvantaged by buying shares in a company and using that dividend income to pay rent.)
Indeed, GDP may be a weak measure of wellbeing. But it is, as intended, a very good measure of potentially taxable activity for the purposes of national accounting. Free time makes people happy, but it does not pay for much adult social care.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
It's actually even easier. Just work longer. We should be pleased. Working to 75 with a life expectancy of 85 is better than working to 65 with a life expectancy of 75.
I'm not sure about that - it depends very much on the state of your health in retirement.
A lot of people are living longer but are not able to do much with it.
Yes, the work forever advocates are either bed-blocking cushy upper middle class desk jobs on inflated salaries, or have never met manual workers or realised that the 20 years at the end of your life are not the same as your middle two decades. Not many footballers are still playing at 75, or refuse collectors.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
UK agri sector is about 1% of the economy. Oddly this doesn't matter if you are wanting to eat and there is no food around. One of the epic fails of just looking at GDP and suchlike is that not all economic activity is properly measurable by its price, but only by its value. Diamonds are expensive, potatoes and bread are cheap. Potatoes and bread have far greater value.
Machine tool sales are less than 0.5% of German GDP - and yet they are the foundation of most if its manufacturing industry (and a fair amount of that of the rest of the world too).
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Hmm: when I visited Nokia's research division in Oolu in winter, it seemed pretty uninhabitable outside the city.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
You're dealing with the political analyst who thought Liz Truss as PM would surprise on the upside.
You cannot compete with that level of genius.
Do you pay Leon for his comedy sketch writing? Personally I prefer John Crace.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
The version I heard was that a Tory candidate knocked on Lord Mountbatten’s door and he happened to be there to answer. She was taken aback and gushingly assumed that she could 'count on his vote.' ‘Actually I’m a socialist,’ he replied, ‘but I believe my butler votes for your lot. I’ll go and fetch him.’
Doubtless apocryphal but amusing nonetheless.
lol. Yes, I am sure there are multiple versions
And there are multiple versions because it is true
I noted - faintly - an echo in the Brexit debate. Generally middle and upper middle class people I knew were all Remain. But there was a top tier of REALLY rich posh people who were Leave. I remember going to a 50th Birthday party a few weeks before the referendum and there was probably a dozen of Britain's 200 richest people in the crowd, and not self-made
That’s a really good thread. Maybe we should all take note of this?
'Full data here with maps and all. Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.'
Hence a national MRP demographic model carries rather less weight than actual local voting data when it comes to assessing who might be where in any particular seat picked at random, such as, say, Newton Abbot.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
Some of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. But agriculture actually extends surprisingly far north - further north in Finland than anywhere else on earth. There is agriculture inside the Arctic Circle. Winters are unproductive, obviously, but Northern Finland in summer is surprisimgly fertile.
Their food security tops even Republic of Ireland apparently.
UK agri sector is about 1% of the economy. Oddly this doesn't matter if you are wanting to eat and there is no food around. One of the epic fails of just looking at GDP and suchlike is that not all economic activity is properly measurable by its price, but only by its value. Diamonds are expensive, potatoes and bread are cheap. Potatoes and bread have far greater value.
Machine tool sales are less than 0.5% of German GDP - and yet they are the foundation of most if its manufacturing industry (and a fair amount of that of the rest of the world too).
Ah hem: Capital Goods as a whole is a much larger percentage. But you are absolutely correct that they (not BMWs) have been the bedrock of German success in the last quarter century.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
Net zero is a very left wing policy that requires a command economy to implement it by distorting the market with big subsidies for favoured methods and banning methods it dosent like and regards the free market as destructive of Gaia.
Banning petrol cars in 2030 or 2035 and only permitting electric cars to be sold would make Lenin blush. If electric cars are so good, they would sell like hot cakes and petrol models would stop being sold due to no one buying them
That landowners also get vast subsidies taken from the electricity bills of the poor for hosting turbines on their land also helps.
(A case of be careful what you wish for. Landowners open coal mine. Landowner makes big profit from Coal Mine. Workers exploited and paid anpittance. Workers object. Form unions. Coal mineNationalised taking it from owner. Workers well paid through subsidies got by taxing landowner.
Landowner goes all green. Demands coal mines closed as wicked polluters and an end to subsidies of them as unfair. Demands eco friendly wind turbine on their land and the redundant miners, now in low paid McJobs to pay the landowner for it through subsidies extracted from their electricity bills. The circle completes).
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
But we are paying "a bit more tax". Taxes are at record levels which doubtless contributes to the feeling even amongst lifelong small-c conservatives that Britain is broken.
Damn you new thread... Long time listener, first time caller etc etc. As a public service announcement I can reveal that my postal ballot arrived today in Southampton Itchen so the election is now on.
Two postal votes reported so far on this site, plus one bloke at work had done one today. So we can all bet on turnout over three. Not three percent: three votes. In addition, I expect to vote so make it 3.99 (actuarily adjusted).
Make that 4 as my superior half has hers as well...
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Having driven across Finland last summer, it seems they use rather a lot of that land for growing fir trees.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Hmm: when I visited Nokia's research division in Oolu in winter, it seemed pretty uninhabitable outside the city.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
It's not often I'll contradict you, but Northern Finland is not uninhabitable. You visited in winter, and little agriculture is possible in winter - but it's possible to grow a surplus in the summer. That's how the cities are there in the first place: they were enabled by a surplus. That's why the agricultural Finns displaced the nomadic herdsmen Lapps right into the Arctic Circle. I was quite struck when I visited Lapland in the winter how many farmhouses there were. Yew, farming seems hopeless in winter - but summer is very different.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
Net zero is a very left wing policy that requires a command economy to implement it by distorting the market with big subsidies for favoured methods and banning methods it dosent like and regards the free market as destructive of Gaia.
Banning petrol cars in 2030 or 2035 and only permitting electric cars to be sold would make Lenin blush. If electric cars are so good, they would sell like hot cakes and petrol models would stop being sold due to no one buying them
That landowners also get vast subsidies taken from the electricity bills of the poor for hosting turbines on their land also helps.
(A case of be careful what you wish for. Landowners open coal mine. Landowner makes big profit from Coal Mine. Workers exploited and paid anpittance. Workers object. Form unions. Coal mineNationalised taking it from owner. Workers well paid through subsidies got by taxing landowner.
Landowner goes all green. Demands coal mines closed as wicked polluters and an end to subsidies of them as unfair. Demands eco friendly wind turbine on their land and the redundant miners, now in low paid McJobs to pay the landowner for it through subsidies extracted from their electricity bills. The circle completes).
And yet the countries which have moved the most to renewables and electric vehicles don't look remotely like that. Indeed, they have more manufacturing than the UK. And they were much less impacted by the rise in commodity prices caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Having driven across Finland last summer, it seems they use rather a lot of that land for growing fir trees.
Yes, it's all forestry.The idea they are growing wheat up to the arctic circle is LUDE
That’s a really good thread. Maybe we should all take note of this?
'Full data here with maps and all. Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.'
It's good advice because there are some very odd seat predictions. For example, my constituency North Dorset is down as one of only two Strong Conservative seats (fair enough) but with Labour as the main challenger. No way can I see the Labour beating the LibDems here. The Labour candidate looks like a paper candidate tbh, chosen late, not local, whereas the LD candidate is an established local resident.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Hmm: when I visited Nokia's research division in Oolu in winter, it seemed pretty uninhabitable outside the city.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
It's not often I'll contradict you, but Northern Finland is not uninhabitable. You visited in winter, and little agriculture is possible in winter - but it's possible to grow a surplus in the summer. That's how the cities are there in the first place: they were enabled by a surplus. That's why the agricultural Finns displaced the nomadic herdsmen Lapps right into the Arctic Circle. I was quite struck when I visited Lapland in the winter how many farmhouses there were. Yew, farming seems hopeless in winter - but summer is very different.
Fair enough, and I would note that I saw lots of covered tomato plants when I was outside Helsinki about a decade ago, and my contact complained that heating them was adding to their electricity bills
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Having driven across Finland last summer, it seems they use rather a lot of that land for growing fir trees.
Yes, it's all forestry.The idea they are growing wheat up to the arctic circle is LUDE
I do have some rather nice strawberry and raspberry jam from what claimed to be the most northerly commercial soft fruit growing operation in the world. But that was from Norway. And south of the artic circle. They have what’s left of the Gulf Stream after we’ve done with it.
As I drove north in heavy rain, all these Norwegians were out in the fields picking fruit.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is reasonably amusing since the word "tundra" comes from Finnish
Not quite - it came into English from Russian via one of the Sami languages. Too many different consonants in a row to be Finnish!
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
I'm chuckling at the idea that Carrie Symonds was some leftie.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
You don't understand posh people. Which is unsurprising
Net zero is a very left wing policy that requires a command economy to implement it by distorting the market with big subsidies for favoured methods and banning methods it dosent like and regards the free market as destructive of Gaia.
Banning petrol cars in 2030 or 2035 and only permitting electric cars to be sold would make Lenin blush. If electric cars are so good, they would sell like hot cakes and petrol models would stop being sold due to no one buying them
That landowners also get vast subsidies taken from the electricity bills of the poor for hosting turbines on their land also helps.
(A case of be careful what you wish for. Landowners open coal mine. Landowner makes big profit from Coal Mine. Workers exploited and paid anpittance. Workers object. Form unions. Coal mineNationalised taking it from owner. Workers well paid through subsidies got by taxing landowner.
Landowner goes all green. Demands coal mines closed as wicked polluters and an end to subsidies of them as unfair. Demands eco friendly wind turbine on their land and the redundant miners, now in low paid McJobs to pay the landowner for it through subsidies extracted from their electricity bills. The circle completes).
Yeah, you're talking shit. Net Zero is incredibly popular across the political spectrum. It even has a majority of support among RefUK voters
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
It's actually even easier. Just work longer. We should be pleased. Working to 75 with a life expectancy of 85 is better than working to 65 with a life expectancy of 75.
I'm not sure about that - it depends very much on the state of your health in retirement.
A lot of people are living longer but are not able to do much with it.
Yes, the work forever advocates are either bed-blocking cushy upper middle class desk jobs on inflated salaries, or have never met manual workers or realised that the 20 years at the end of your life are not the same as your middle two decades. Not many footballers are still playing at 75, or refuse collectors.
Yep, my mum was an accountant and worked until 70. My partner's mum, a psychiatric nurse, had to retire at 60 as she could no longer do some of the more physical aspects of care.
Not sure I fancy being in the classroom teaching 11-18 year olds past 65, ngl.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Much Obliged Jeeves (1971 - I remember it being published) has a plot which concerns a by-election at, I think, Market Snodsbury. I think this is the late novel in which we discover Jeeves's Christian name.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
As fans of The Rest is Entertainment will know, Marina Hyde is also responsible for about half of Hollywood's output. (And her co-presenter Richard Osman seems to be producer of just about every television programme.)
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
How much of South Korea, Singapore and to a less extent Hong Kong rapid growth down to this planned economy type approach e.g. where the government allow very large companies to grow but directs them what business they should be in, and also if another business goes bust that they must step in and take it over if said industry is deemed key.
It seems a half way house between total free market capitalism and the very heavy state planned capitalism of China.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
That’s a really good thread. Maybe we should all take note of this?
'Full data here with maps and all. Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.'
It's good advice because there are some very odd seat predictions. For example, my constituency North Dorset is down as one of only two Strong Conservative seats (fair enough) but with Labour as the main challenger. No way can I see the Labour beating the LibDems here. The Labour candidate looks like a paper candidate tbh, chosen late, not local, whereas the LD candidate is an established local resident.
It’s very tempting to cling to crap data when it’s all we have. But it’s crap data, all the same.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
It's actually even easier. Just work longer. We should be pleased. Working to 75 with a life expectancy of 85 is better than working to 65 with a life expectancy of 75.
I'm not sure about that - it depends very much on the state of your health in retirement.
A lot of people are living longer but are not able to do much with it.
Yes, the work forever advocates are either bed-blocking cushy upper middle class desk jobs on inflated salaries, or have never met manual workers or realised that the 20 years at the end of your life are not the same as your middle two decades. Not many footballers are still playing at 75, or refuse collectors.
Yep, my mum was an accountant and worked until 70. My partner's mum, a psychiatric nurse, had to retire at 60 as she could no longer do some of the more physical aspects of care.
Not sure I fancy being in the classroom teaching 11-18 year olds past 65, ngl.
Well, yes, up to a point. But it's always been the case that physical work has been hard as one approaches retirement, and I'd say our 70 year olds are as healthy as the 60 year olds of a couple of generations ago.
@jeremycorbyn · 2h Unfortunately, a tabloid newspaper has got hold of a music video I recorded in Islington North with an iconic grime artist I've admired for years.
They are planning to publish a heavily edited clip, so I'm releasing the full version myself. Watch here: https://tinyurl.com/yeymfb96
LOL at Jeremy Corbyn rick-rolling people onto the Register to Vote site.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is reasonably amusing since the word "tundra" comes from Finnish
Not quite - it came into English from Russian via one of the Sami languages. Too many different consonants in a row to be Finnish!
Sami, you're quite correct, clumsy from me conflating the two. Still, in the right ballpark. Northern Finland is certainly tundra. What constitutes "uninhabitable" is perhaps trickier. I don't think it'd be easy to survive there without external inputs. Global markets make some primitively uninhabitable places inhabitable. I don't know whether northern Finland falls into that category.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
It's actually even easier. Just work longer. We should be pleased. Working to 75 with a life expectancy of 85 is better than working to 65 with a life expectancy of 75.
I'm not sure about that - it depends very much on the state of your health in retirement.
A lot of people are living longer but are not able to do much with it.
Yes, the work forever advocates are either bed-blocking cushy upper middle class desk jobs on inflated salaries, or have never met manual workers or realised that the 20 years at the end of your life are not the same as your middle two decades. Not many footballers are still playing at 75, or refuse collectors.
True but it is undeniably the case that since WW2 it is both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy that has increased. The small increases in retirement age are dwarfed by the increase in healthy life expectancy.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
The inland lakes of Finland are a tourist destination waiting to be discovered for most foreigners.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Hmm: when I visited Nokia's research division in Oolu in winter, it seemed pretty uninhabitable outside the city.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
It's not often I'll contradict you, but Northern Finland is not uninhabitable. You visited in winter, and little agriculture is possible in winter - but it's possible to grow a surplus in the summer. That's how the cities are there in the first place: they were enabled by a surplus. That's why the agricultural Finns displaced the nomadic herdsmen Lapps right into the Arctic Circle. I was quite struck when I visited Lapland in the winter how many farmhouses there were. Yew, farming seems hopeless in winter - but summer is very different.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
How much of South Korea, Singapore and to a less extent Hong Kong rapid growth down to this planned economy type approach e.g. where the government allow very large companies to grow but directs them what business they should be in, and also if another business goes bust that they must step in and take it over if said industry is deemed key.
It seems a half way house between total free market capitalism and the very heavy state planned capitalism of China.
Well, I would argue the most important factor in Hong Kong and Singapore's growth was simple geographical happenstance.
The UK built up ports in places that were good for trade: Singapore at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, where the Malacca Strait connects the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. And Hong Kong was as a natural deep water port at the edge of China. But - for a long time - not actually China.
Korea is different, in that the government pushed domestic producers. But it also didn't just have one national champion: LG and Samsung have always been competitors, in the same way that Sony and Matsushita were competitors in Japan. I'd argue the danger is having one national champion, rather than a number of competing firms.
I keep meaning to a log cabin by a lake type break in Finland.
I stayed in one last summer, about 100 miles from the Russian border. Wooden cabin up the hill from a lake. Miles and miles on unmetalled roads through trees, with precious few signposts. No running water, other than an outside tap pumped up from the lake. A hot tub, powered by a wood burner (light, fiddle with the fire for an hour, wait another hour, get in and then realise it will continue to get hotter until the fire goes out). Wood powered sauna. Rowing boat, fishing rods, and mozzies that could bite for England.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
But we are paying "a bit more tax". Taxes are at record levels which doubtless contributes to the feeling even amongst lifelong small-c conservatives that Britain is broken.
What contributes to my feeling that 'Britain is broken' is that so many things seem not to work properly anymore. The level of tax I pay is frankly a very minor point compared to roads full of potholes, trains not running whenever it rains hard, the difficulty of getting a GP or hospital appointment, the fact that we have to put 1000s of asylum seekers in hotels because we aren't able to process them quickly (or at all), that dangerous prisoners are released due to lack of prison places, no one ever answers the phone at HMRC, or the council, or DWP, or DVLA, probate now takes months to obtain, planning is a nightmare...
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
Yes, serious and curious. That's quite a label to put on me. "Extreme rightwing". It means I am the same as Hitler
You need to justify it. I am unaware that I have advocated gassing Jews, but maybe I have?
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
Denmark and South Korea are more prosperous than us because we have too many thickos..
Very interesting point but heads in directions as contentious as a TERF war on Twitter if you are not careful.
For what it is worth I think it is not too many thickos in the UK it is a somewhat nihilistic dog in manger attitude in too much of the population.
As a kid in a Lambeth comprehensive, if you worked hard and strived you had a target on your back.
As far as the peer group was concerned the aim was to do as little work as possible and make the teachers life a misery.
This was institutionalised in comics like the Beano where Walter the Softie and an equivalent in the Bash Street Kids had their lives made a misery for being "swots"
Basically ingrained class warfare and factionalisation engendering nihilism and low productivity.
Damn you new thread... Long time listener, first time caller etc etc. As a public service announcement I can reveal that my postal ballot arrived today in Southampton Itchen so the election is now on.
Two postal votes reported so far on this site, plus one bloke at work had done one today. So we can all bet on turnout over three. Not three percent: three votes. In addition, I expect to vote so make it 3.99 (actuarily adjusted).
Make that 4 as my superior half has hers as well...
Turnout has quadrupled in half a day. Gonna be a record if this trend persists.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Much Obliged Jeeves (1971 - I remember it being published) has a plot which concerns a by-election at, I think, Market Snodsbury. I think this is the late novel in which we discover Jeeves's Christian name.
In a way, Jeeves is exactly who the Tories have lost as voters in recent years. Unflashy, quietly competent, cautious of change, polite to everyone, always kind, witty, and charming.
Gillingham was Labour from 1997 to 2010 and looks like it will go back to Labour.
From the Ipsos Mori Labour will win almost all the seats they won in 1997 plus a few more but the Tories will hold slightly more of their seats from the LDs than they did in 1997 and still have a few seats in Scotland on the borders particularly and 1 or 2 in rural Wales which they didn't in 1997.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is reasonably amusing since the word "tundra" comes from Finnish
Not quite - it came into English from Russian via one of the Sami languages. Too many different consonants in a row to be Finnish!
Sami, you're quite correct, clumsy from me conflating the two. Still, in the right ballpark. Northern Finland is certainly tundra. What constitutes "uninhabitable" is perhaps trickier. I don't think it'd be easy to survive there without external inputs. Global markets make some primitively uninhabitable places inhabitable. I don't know whether northern Finland falls into that category.
The Sámi don’t really grow anything; they fish and herd reindeer. How they get their five a day, I’m not sure. They once populated regions further south - how much so is still debated - but were marginalised to the far north by the spread of the Norse peoples.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
Hmm: when I visited Nokia's research division in Oolu in winter, it seemed pretty uninhabitable outside the city.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
It's not often I'll contradict you, but Northern Finland is not uninhabitable. You visited in winter, and little agriculture is possible in winter - but it's possible to grow a surplus in the summer. That's how the cities are there in the first place: they were enabled by a surplus. That's why the agricultural Finns displaced the nomadic herdsmen Lapps right into the Arctic Circle. I was quite struck when I visited Lapland in the winter how many farmhouses there were. Yew, farming seems hopeless in winter - but summer is very different.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
How much of South Korea, Singapore and to a less extent Hong Kong rapid growth down to this planned economy type approach e.g. where the government allow very large companies to grow but directs them what business they should be in, and also if another business goes bust that they must step in and take it over if said industry is deemed key.
It seems a half way house between total free market capitalism and the very heavy state planned capitalism of China.
Well, I would argue the most important factor in Hong Kong and Singapore's growth was simple geographical happenstance.
The UK built up ports in places that were good for trade: Singapore at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, where the Malacca Strait connects the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. And Hong Kong was as a natural deep water port at the edge of China. But - for a long time - not actually China.
Korea is different, in that the government pushed domestic producers. But it also didn't just have one national champion: LG and Samsung have always been competitors, in the same way that Sony and Matsushita were competitors in Japan. I'd argue the danger is having one national champion, rather than a number of competing firms.
That is what I mean't by South Korea having that half way house. The state have played a big part in what industries they wanted the chaebols to be involved in, but also very big on there must be competition. Hence why when Daewoo went bust they demanded that another chaebol bought their electronics business to ensure competition remains.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Much Obliged Jeeves (1971 - I remember it being published) has a plot which concerns a by-election at, I think, Market Snodsbury. I think this is the late novel in which we discover Jeeves's Christian name.
In a way, Jeeves is exactly who the Tories have lost as voters in recent years. Unflashy, quietly competent, cautious of change, polite to everyone, always kind, witty, and charming.
Not unlike myself.
Oh, you're not the hero of 'Biggles Flies Undone'? I can see that Jeeves would raise a disapproving eyebrow.
I am going through my stats and I think that would be the biggest swing at a general election against either the Tories or Labour since 1945.
Then again, if the average swing is in the high teens, and the local swings are more proportional than uniform, the top end has to come out here or hereabouts.
What is the record GE swing? (If I had to guess, somewhere with a New Town).
I keep meaning to a log cabin by a lake type break in Finland.
I stayed in one last summer, about 100 miles from the Russian border. Wooden cabin up the hill from a lake. Miles and miles on unmetalled roads through trees, with precious few signposts. No running water, other than an outside tap pumped up from the lake. A hot tub, powered by a wood burner (light, fiddle with the fire for an hour, wait another hour, get in and then realise it will continue to get hotter until the fire goes out). Wood powered sauna. Rowing boat, fishing rods, and mozzies that could bite for England.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
Denmark and South Korea are more prosperous than us because we have too many thickos..
Very interesting point but heads in directions as contentious as a TERF war on Twitter if you are not careful.
For what it is worth I think it is not too many thickos in the UK it is a somewhat nihilistic dog in manger attitude in too much of the population.
As a kid in a Lambeth comprehensive, if you worked hard and strived you had a target on your back.
As far as the peer group was concerned the aim was to do as little work as possible and make the teachers life a misery.
This was institutionalised in comics like the Beano where Walter the Softie and an equivalent in the Bash Street Kids had their lives made a misery for being "swots"
Basically ingrained class warfare and factionalisation engendering nihilism and low productivity.
The same at Slough Grammar where Boris derided his old school chum Cameron as a girly swot. Even at the top, effortless superiority is preferred to visible effort.
If anything like that is occurring in particular places, then two things arise: there couldn't be really a lower limit to Tory possibilities - massacre is possible; and you can throw UNS out of the window as a worthwhile tool.
It's also an unchanged seat, so useful for comparison.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
What bollocks. Countries like Denmark and Finland didn’t have an empire, but work fine today through the simple measure of people being OK to pay a bit more tax.
Nothing to do with Denmark having a far lower population (and population density) and fertile land enabling them to produce three times as much food as they need for self sufficiency and export the difference.
Similar arguments apply with Finland.
UK. Not so much.
This is laughable.
Much of Finland is uninhabitable tundra. It suggests that the UK's problems would be solved by merger with Greenland. Or, indeed, made much worse by Scottish independence.
And if population size is all, we can constantly get richer by cutting the country in half.
None of Finland is uninhabitable tundra - it's nothing like Greenland in the slightest. Agriculture extends right up into the north of the country
This is reasonably amusing since the word "tundra" comes from Finnish
Not quite - it came into English from Russian via one of the Sami languages. Too many different consonants in a row to be Finnish!
Sami, you're quite correct, clumsy from me conflating the two. Still, in the right ballpark. Northern Finland is certainly tundra. What constitutes "uninhabitable" is perhaps trickier. I don't think it'd be easy to survive there without external inputs. Global markets make some primitively uninhabitable places inhabitable. I don't know whether northern Finland falls into that category.
The Sámi don’t really grow anything; they fish and herd reindeer. How they get their five a day, I’m not sure. They once populated regions further south - how much so is still debated - but were marginalised to the far north by the spread of the Norse peoples.
Don't forget the local equivalents of raspberries and bilberries. Forest fruits.
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
Denmark and South Korea are more prosperous than us because we have too many thickos..
Very interesting point but heads in directions as contentious as a TERF war on Twitter if you are not careful.
For what it is worth I think it is not too many thickos in the UK it is a somewhat nihilistic dog in manger attitude in too much of the population.
As a kid in a Lambeth comprehensive, if you worked hard and strived you had a target on your back.
As far as the peer group was concerned the aim was to do as little work as possible and make the teachers life a misery.
This was institutionalised in comics like the Beano where Walter the Softie and an equivalent in the Bash Street Kids had their lives made a misery for being "swots"
Basically ingrained class warfare and factionalisation engendering nihilism and low productivity.
The same at Slough Grammar where Boris derided his old school chum Cameron as a girly swot. Even at the top, effortless superiority is preferred to visible effort.
Interestingly Mori have Labour gaining Tonbridge by 1% but the Tories beating the LDs in Tunbridge Wells by 13% with Labour second. May be a bit too generous to Labour and a bit under generous to the LDs therefore
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Live longer, work longer, and save more.
Simple as that.
It's actually even easier. Just work longer. We should be pleased. Working to 75 with a life expectancy of 85 is better than working to 65 with a life expectancy of 75.
I'm not sure about that - it depends very much on the state of your health in retirement.
A lot of people are living longer but are not able to do much with it.
Yes, the work forever advocates are either bed-blocking cushy upper middle class desk jobs on inflated salaries, or have never met manual workers or realised that the 20 years at the end of your life are not the same as your middle two decades. Not many footballers are still playing at 75, or refuse collectors.
True but it is undeniably the case that since WW2 it is both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy that has increased. The small increases in retirement age are dwarfed by the increase in healthy life expectancy.
But that's less fab than it sounds because it entails unhealthy life expectancy also increasing. Say your life expectancy increases from 75 to 80 and your healthy life expectancy from 60 to 64 you have gained a year of unhealthy life. From what I have seen of the unhealthy elderly, it seems entirely possible to me that an extra year of pain and dementia easily cancels out the good health of 60 to 64
The Conservative Party has, for so long, been a successful political party because it has been able to tie together disparate groups, who don't all share exactly the same ideology.
And it's done this by being pragmatic and remembering that there are going to be people who believe homosexuality is a sin, and there are going to be people are publicly gay, but they might share common views about - say - the size of the state.
I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who was caught on tape saying that the US was in a (culture) war, and there would only be one winner.
No, Justice Alito, there is no winner. You cannot silence the voices of the 50% of people who disagree with you without actual war. And that actual war (see the Thirty Years War for an example) will end with everyone grudgingly agreeing that actually they can't agree and they can't force other people to agree with them.
The Conservative Party cannot just be the party of people left behind by globalisation. Nor can it just be the party of pensioners. Nor can it just be the party of wealthy plutocrats. It needs to be a big tent. If you choose to silence - or make unwelcome - the voices that disagree with you, then you are consigning yourself to electoral oblivion.
This is why "we didn't win because we weren't centrist enough" and "we didn't win because we weren't right wing enough" are both bullshit arguments. You didn't win because you were unable to make the tent big enough.
Where was the voting market behind monetarism when MT made that her guiding theme? There wasn't one. She decided that that was the right thing for Britain, and set about winning the arguments. That's how you get positive change. Crafting your platform out of a mishmash of what voters have found acceptable up until now is not a plan to get into (or stay in) government; it's a way to go around in circles achieving very little.
And I also don't think the issue is that Tories 'haven't been right wing enough', it's that they have sold themselves as the right wing alternative, benefitted from doing so, and changed their minds completely when it comes to actually doing anything right wing. That's a question of trust, rather than a question of politics. Those who feel that they haven't been centrist enough should vote for parties that espouse social democracy, of which there are two in the political mainstream. Why do they need a third? It smacks of reducing the alternatives available to voters because they aren't actually that confident in the attractiveness of their centrist prospectus.
Every time the Tories get into power they're lured into nanny-statism. Thatcher had enough about her to push against that for several years. Imperfect though such direction might prove I think it is beneficial. Reducing the size of the state should be top of the list for any government.
OK.
The number of people of pensionable age is rising every year: we have promised them (repeatedly) that there is no circumstance where their pensions will grow less than 2% or wages or inflation. In addition, the proportion of people who are pensioners will grow every year. And a pensioner costs approximately 15x as much in social and health care as someone in their 20s.
So: interest payments, healthcare and pension cost increases are nailed on. And they are half the budget.
We need to spend more on defence. Policing and the administration of justice have been cut to the bone.
I want to cut the size of the state too. But we all need to be realistic about the challenges facing us with a greying population.
Plus everyone wants more transport projects and everyone wants increasingly improving schools. Add on people always having a pet regulation….
The problem is that most expect the state can do more than it can do. It could only do what it did in the first place due to the revenue of empire and tbe legacy assets and soft power in the post empire world which have slowly inevitably decayed
Also, as life becomes more complex the state can do less. EM Forsters "The Machine Stops" was a boring book foisted on us at school but a very prohetic one.
The choice is collapse with authoritarianism on the way or a wholesale deregulation, a very limited state based on a principle of Caveat Emptor and an acceptance that people will make bad or inept decisions and suffer as a result and it is not the states job to prevent or mitigate this, other than to set some core, simple to understand rules (which is basically what Common Law is).
I think the die was cast though when Cameron beat Davis in 2005, or perhaps even when Wilson won in 1964.
You're overstating the "revenue of empire" here, as costs matched benefits from the 1870s onwards even if you look at it from a pure revenue perspective.
On a wider economic basis it produced a clear loss, especially when you factor in the downsides of it fucking our trade and monetary policy over and over and over again until we finally began to cut our losses in 1957.
Direct revenue is one thing. Indirect (a captive market for UK manufacturers) is another, this has lingered on to a certain extent even now (e.g MK will have good sales in Singapore, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong and half the middle East and Africa as a legacy of empire is that they use BS1363 plugs and sockets.
Plenty more such trade was kicked in the nuts in 1973 when joined customs union with rival industrial countries and put trade barriers up with such countries as a result.
The root cause of empire is need, a country not having enough land and resources to support it's population sustainably. See Rome, Japan and us (not to mention Russia invading Ukraine, both now and in aftermath of the Russian Revolution)
It dosen't help that we are making it worse by unsustainable population increase and shunning the Oil, Gas and Coal resources (the latter of which is still abundant) so are therefore making our industry uncompetitive compared with those that do exploit such resources unreserved.
And yet S Korea - and postwar Japan - achieved great prosperity without significant natural resources, or captive markets.
And Hong Kong. And Singapore. And Switzerland.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
Denmark and South Korea are more prosperous than us because we have too many thickos..
Very interesting point but heads in directions as contentious as a TERF war on Twitter if you are not careful.
For what it is worth I think it is not too many thickos in the UK it is a somewhat nihilistic dog in manger attitude in too much of the population.
As a kid in a Lambeth comprehensive, if you worked hard and strived you had a target on your back.
As far as the peer group was concerned the aim was to do as little work as possible and make the teachers life a misery.
This was institutionalised in comics like the Beano where Walter the Softie and an equivalent in the Bash Street Kids had their lives made a misery for being "swots"
Basically ingrained class warfare and factionalisation engendering nihilism and low productivity.
The same at Slough Grammar where Boris derided his old school chum Cameron as a girly swot. Even at the top, effortless superiority is preferred to visible effort.
We have a problem that even our best educated don't like taking risk, unis are bad at fairly supporting ideas* and even those that do get a start-up going those in the UK seem keen to exit ASAP and take their payday.
Politicians seem pretty clueless about this.
* some UK universities will ask for upto 40% of a start-up for very small injection of capital.
"In November, long before #zeroseats, even as the media was reporting politics as usual, I wrote a thread on why the Tories were heading for an epochal defeat. Now that this is received wisdom, it's time for a new thread, forecasting how Labour will govern. Be very afraid."
I pray that this dude is wrong; I fear in my vittals that he is bang on
A lot of this talk about Labour seeking to stop any future government going in a right wing direction seems like scaremongering to me.
No Parliament can bind it's successor. The Tories could have thrown out most or all of the 1997-2010 reforms in the past 14 years if they'd wished but the fact is they chose not to.
But the Equality Act did exactly that, without anyone realising, until very recently
And he makes that point
As did the European Communities Act Solution to the Equality act preventing reform is same as European Communities Act & Human Rights preventing reform. Repeal or Heavily Amend it.
Tories have been torn apart because they thought Brexit was enough. It wasn't Brexit was just the enabling measure that enabled the rest to be done. They were not done and as a result reforms that the public wanted could not be enacted and they regard the Tories as having betrayed them.
Exactly right
I blame Boris. He had the majority to do all this, but he was too frit of his posh lefty friends, fam and neighbz
For this to change, it will take a firmly rightwing leader of a firmly rightwing party that doesn't give a tinker's wank about fashionable opinion
OMG Georgia!!!
Sadly, Fair comment.
I fear Boris had two fatal flaws (possibly 3).
1) Weakness - so he didn't have the balls to stick with essentially the same policy as Sweden and more unforgivably, didn't end the lockdown nonsense after six weeks when it was obvious that Covid was a disease of the very elderly, very ill with something else and very unlucky (he clearly thought it was nonsense as illustrated by his behaviour).
2) Needing to be liked (which let his posh lefty friends have a veto).
3) I suspect (pure spectulation) he got some policy ideas from domestic sources. That would account for his U turn on Eagle Slicers and the like, when the M'Learned former Mrs Boris was swapped for the current incumbent.
It is the firm bit rather than particularly right wing bit that is needed. Someone willing to do what Thatcher did when losing a judicial review. Pass an act overthrowing the judgement.
Did Boris have any lefty friends while Prime Minister? Based on the friend he married and the friends who gave him freebies and those friends who advised him on getting Paterson and/or Pincher off the hook, Boris's entire social circle is well-heeled Tory poshos.
Well-heeled Tory poshos are generally left of Corbyn. That's the problem
And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Tories to the left of Corbyn must be a pretty select group. Johnson is just a standard issue boarding school libertarian with a side order of little Englander prejudices and his social circle would I imagine be in tune with that. If he has any left wing friends he has certainly kept them well hidden. The "rich upper class lefty" trope is well loved by chippy rightists on here but I have never encountered one in the wild.
That just proves how irredeemably lower middle class you are
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
I'm sure these people exist, but the point is that you can name them because there are so few of them. They probably all work for the Guardian. I've never met any of them. But I've met a never ending line of posh right wingers, because there are so many more of them (maybe you should get a job in finance). One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
In what way am I "extreme rightwing"? Genuinely curious
Dude are you serious?
How many actual "hard" right posters do we have on here? Plenty of disgruntled conservatives, some sitting this one out, a few voting Labour to send a message, a few reluctantly voting Conservative for fear of worse (Farage, or a massive Labour majority).
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
I'll fess up. I might vote Reform. It's either Starmer for laughs or Reform to kill the Tories
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
I keep meaning to a log cabin by a lake type break in Finland.
I stayed in one last summer, about 100 miles from the Russian border. Wooden cabin up the hill from a lake. Miles and miles on unmetalled roads through trees, with precious few signposts. No running water, other than an outside tap pumped up from the lake. A hot tub, powered by a wood burner (light, fiddle with the fire for an hour, wait another hour, get in and then realise it will continue to get hotter until the fire goes out). Wood powered sauna. Rowing boat, fishing rods, and mozzies that could bite for England.
And what does said cabin cost to rent?
I’ve only booked the one, so have no idea whether it was competitive, but it worked out at about £100 a night as I recall. For a cabin that sleeps two; the biggest drawback was the rather uncomfortable beds.
Mind you his comments will not I imagine win over many Tories to Labour but might have a few leftwingers spitting out their herbal tea and going Green.
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
The Football Governance Bill ran out of time and was therefore dropped before the GE.
Labour will shortly reintroduce the Bill. But the Labour Culture Secretary has said it will not be a "cut and paste" job - she will review the Tracey Crouch report again and see how the Bill can be strengthened.
In particular she will consider a proposal to introduce a 10% levy on PL transfer fees.
She will also consider expanding the Bill to regulate ticket prices.
And who knows maybe expand into other areas as well?
Again this background it may seem surprising that Jim Ratcliffe is supporting the party whose victory will undoubtedly have the most adverse consequences for his Man Utd investment.
Or maybe he knows Labour is going to win and he is about to start a massive lobbying campaign? And he is starting by buttering them up?
Damn you new thread... Long time listener, first time caller etc etc. As a public service announcement I can reveal that my postal ballot arrived today in Southampton Itchen so the election is now on.
What's the picture in Itchen nowadays? When I lived there it was Lab, but it came close to flipping in 2010 to Con (I voted LD) and IIRC it then did in 2015.
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And twas ever thus. Wasn't it Wodehouse who observed that his dukes voted Labour and Jeeves was a Tory?
Yes it increases Russias population but people wise the issue is about ethnic Russians who had been planted there during the days of the Russian Empire and USSR (just as the partition of Ireland was about such plantation issues).
I suspect something similar to the Ukraine War would have happened in Ireland before the 1920s were out, had home rule without partition been rammed through.
She was the former Director of Communications for the Tory Party and also a SPAD to a few Tory cabinet ministers.
'Full data here with maps and all. Of course you're all sensible people and wouldn't put too much weight on individual seat estimates because you know modelling can't take into account all the complexities of local campaigns. I trust you all.'
Easy!...
Doubtless apocryphal but amusing nonetheless.
As, come to mention it, do most of the population pyramids in Western Europe, plus China, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
Fortunately, we have brilliant politicians who are here to explain the problem, and to talk about the options we have - working later, expecting less from the NHS. etc. This ensures that the election is fought on who is best placed to solved the challenges facing the country rather than something like... ahhh... trans rights.
No, seriously, the posh are left wing. It's not a joke. The gags about Guardian journalists' backgrounds are not a spoof
Marina Hyde has been mentioned on this thread:
"Hyde is the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, and his wife, the former Diana Elizabeth Jane Duncan. Through her father, she is the granddaughter of aviation pioneer and Conservative politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, 1st Baronet. She attended Downe House School, near Newbury in Berkshire,[1] and read English at Christ Church, Oxford.["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Hyde
She's not just posh she's absurdly rich, I know this personally
Johnson used to say, if he was conflicted as to what to do politically he would ask the Wheelers for their advice and do the Polar opposite.
You cannot compete with that level of genius.
And by agriculture, I assume you mostly mean "trees".
Finland, like most countries, has the vast bulk of its population in a very small percentage of its landmass. This is true of Canada, Australia, the US, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Japan, etc.
It's why using raw population density as a measure of how crowded a country is mostly demonstrates the density of the person making the argument.
And there are multiple versions because it is true
I noted - faintly - an echo in the Brexit debate. Generally middle and upper middle class people I knew were all Remain. But there was a top tier of REALLY rich posh people who were Leave. I remember going to a 50th Birthday party a few weeks before the referendum and there was probably a dozen of Britain's 200 richest people in the crowd, and not self-made
All LEAVE
Banning petrol cars in 2030 or 2035 and only permitting electric cars to be sold would make Lenin blush. If electric cars are so good, they would sell like hot cakes and petrol models would stop being sold due to no one buying them
That landowners also get vast subsidies taken from the electricity bills of the poor for hosting turbines on their land also helps.
(A case of be careful what you wish for. Landowners open coal mine. Landowner makes big profit from Coal Mine. Workers exploited and paid anpittance. Workers object. Form unions. Coal mineNationalised taking it from owner. Workers well paid through subsidies got by taxing landowner.
Landowner goes all green. Demands coal mines closed as wicked polluters and an end to subsidies of them as unfair. Demands eco friendly wind turbine on their land and the redundant miners, now in low paid McJobs to pay the landowner for it through subsidies extracted from their electricity bills. The circle completes).
I was quite struck when I visited Lapland in the winter how many farmhouses there were. Yew, farming seems hopeless in winter - but summer is very different.
https://www.vectormaps.co.uk/vectormaps/finland-agricultural-map/
One thing you need to bear in mind is that you are extremely right wing. So people you think of as lefties (despite them eg working for the Tory party) are not lefties on any reasonable definition of the word. It's the same mindset that sees Corbynites call Labour moderate red Tories etc.
It's almost like the most important natural resource is the human brain.
As I drove north in heavy rain, all these Norwegians were out in the fields picking fruit.
https://eciu.net/media/press-releases/2024/election-poll-voters-for-all-parties-committed-to-net-zero#:~:text=Overall, three-quarters (76,a whole also backing it.
Not sure I fancy being in the classroom teaching 11-18 year olds past 65, ngl.
It seems a half way house between total free market capitalism and the very heavy state planned capitalism of China.
Billionaire Man Utd goes on to criticise ‘not terribly successful’ recent prime ministers
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/18/sir-jim-ratcliffe-manchester-united-backs-labour-election/
https://www.vectormaps.co.uk/vectormaps/finland-agricultural-map/
Some pastoral land quite far north - but that's livestock, Cows, sheep, reindeer. Of course there might be the odd kitchen garden but it's trivial
Agriculture as we know it: fields of wheat or corn, even turnips or kale, are limited to the far south. Coz Finland is col and northerly
The UK built up ports in places that were good for trade: Singapore at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, where the Malacca Strait connects the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. And Hong Kong was as a natural deep water port at the edge of China. But - for a long time - not actually China.
Korea is different, in that the government pushed domestic producers. But it also didn't just have one national champion: LG and Samsung have always been competitors, in the same way that Sony and Matsushita were competitors in Japan. I'd argue the danger is having one national champion, rather than a number of competing firms.
You need to justify it. I am unaware that I have advocated gassing Jews, but maybe I have?
"Re-elect Rehman in Rainham" is in trouble...
Gillingham & Rainham voting intention (+/- 5%, changes vs 2019 notional)
LAB: 55% (+27)
CON: 23% (-39)
REF: 15% (+15)
LDEM: 5% (=)
GRN: 2% (=)
@wethinkpolling/@TheEconomist, 5th-16th June. N=376
https://twitter.com/OwenWntr/status/1803116579397177578
Very interesting point but heads in directions as contentious as a TERF war on Twitter if you are not careful.
For what it is worth I think it is not too many thickos in the UK it is a somewhat nihilistic dog in manger attitude in too much of the population.
As a kid in a Lambeth comprehensive, if you worked hard and strived you had a target on your back.
As far as the peer group was concerned the aim was to do as little work as possible and make the teachers life a misery.
This was institutionalised in comics like the Beano where Walter the Softie and an equivalent in the Bash Street Kids had their lives made a misery for being "swots"
Basically ingrained class warfare and factionalisation engendering nihilism and low productivity.
What's funny is the completely static LD and Green projection even then.
Not unlike myself.
From the Ipsos Mori Labour will win almost all the seats they won in 1997 plus a few more but the Tories will hold slightly more of their seats from the LDs than they did in 1997 and still have a few seats in Scotland on the borders particularly and 1 or 2 in rural Wales which they didn't in 1997.
But I'm struggling to think of anyone who's actually declared for Reform. Including Leon.
With Reform at ~18% in the polls, it's a sign of how detached PB demographics are from reality. Either that, or there are a lot of 'shy reformers' out there.
What is the record GE swing? (If I had to guess, somewhere with a New Town).
It's also an unchanged seat, so useful for comparison.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10429341/
https://tomblomfield.com/post/750852175114174464/taking-risk
We have a problem that even our best educated don't like taking risk, unis are bad at fairly supporting ideas* and even those that do get a start-up going those in the UK seem keen to exit ASAP and take their payday.
Politicians seem pretty clueless about this.
* some UK universities will ask for upto 40% of a start-up for very small injection of capital.
But in what universe is Reform "far right"? They aren't even "hard right" by mainland European standards. Indeed they sometimes struggle to be rightwing, so far has the Overton Window shifted
Their big thing is immigration, Are they going to shoot the boats and drown people (as has been happening off the EU shores)? No. They want to "tow boats back to France". That may be a dream, but it ain't the Shoah. As for overall immigration, they want "net zero" - in a recent interview Farage admitted that might still mean "600,000 immigrants" but they want to keep the incomings and outgoings balanced and the population stable, for a while, as our infrastructure cannot sustain explosive growth (and looking at our rivers, they have a point)
That's it. That's Britain's "Nazi party" - gently towing boats and trying not to destroy rivers. Wow. Practically Treblinka
'Mr Caudwell said he had donated to the Conservatives in 2019 “because I couldn’t possibly stand a Corbyn government, and I am still of exactly the same view there.”
He praised Sir Keir's attempts to get rid of what he called "the loony Left" which he claimed had focused on "extreme socialist policies", instead of "creating a wealthy Britain".
"We can't tax rich people in order to help the poor because they'll go off to Monaco and other places, we have to create real genuine wealth.”
He added that “I hope to goodness I am right in my judgement and they make Britain great again.”'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw00rgq24xvo
The Football Governance Bill ran out of time and was therefore dropped before the GE.
Labour will shortly reintroduce the Bill. But the Labour Culture Secretary has said it will not be a "cut and paste" job - she will review the Tracey Crouch report again and see how the Bill can be strengthened.
In particular she will consider a proposal to introduce a 10% levy on PL transfer fees.
She will also consider expanding the Bill to regulate ticket prices.
And who knows maybe expand into other areas as well?
Again this background it may seem surprising that Jim Ratcliffe is supporting the party whose victory will undoubtedly have the most adverse consequences for his Man Utd investment.
Or maybe he knows Labour is going to win and he is about to start a massive lobbying campaign? And he is starting by buttering them up?