Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
The shadow health secretary has said he would buy up private beds for the NHS, in defiance of objections from “middle-class Lefties”. Wes Streeting said a Labour government would get the NHS to buy thousands of beds from care homes, to “unblock” a failing health and care system, while expanding use of private hospitals for state-funded operations.
Mr Streeting said there was “nothing Left-wing” about leaving working class patients to lie in pain because of “middle class Lefty” objections to the use of the private sector.
Yes. Commentary is one of those jobs where making it look easy is part of the job, but it is not actually easy. So finding good ones is tricky and you can understand why broadcasters are reluctant to twist rather than stick. But Murphy has baseline bloke-in-pub level insight; adds nothing and frequently just wrong.
He is utterly clueless and also has a voice that would have the mice hurling themselves onto the traps.
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
"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?
I'm somewhat lothe to indulge your narcissism but I guess I owe you a response. I said you were extremely right wing, not that you were "extreme rightwing". That's just the impression I get from your posts, eg on "Muslim rape gangs", admiration for Putinist positions on gender and love of post fascist politicians like Giorgia Meloni, espousal of zero immigration, your war on woke, the fact you see a Thatcherite Brexiteer like Rishi Sunak as a wet, that you think people who work for the Tory party are lefties, your dislike of paying tax... I could go in but I won't as I don't find you quite as interesting as you do. Why don't you do one of those political compass tests and see what it says? I am fairly sure it won't identify you as a libertarian socialist as it did for me. None of this is a value judgement BTW, you are welcome to your views, I simply struggle to see how you can be so unaware of where your opinions place you on the political scale.
Leon in May: “The young really ARE stupider, and here we see that evidenced. Part of this can be blamed on migration from less cognitively blessed areas of the world, and of course by the multiple impacts of Covid and lockdown - but not all of it”
That’s not the first time he’s made clear his out-and-out racism, his view that different human “races” have very different genetic traits, including that affect intelligence.
Is it a Hitlerite rumour that some parts of the world have less impressive education systems than others? How is that Nazi?
if you import people from Denmark or Singapore there's a good chance they are highly educated and have degrees. Somalia or Peru, less so
The shadow health secretary has said he would buy up private beds for the NHS, in defiance of objections from “middle-class Lefties”. Wes Streeting said a Labour government would get the NHS to buy thousands of beds from care homes, to “unblock” a failing health and care system, while expanding use of private hospitals for state-funded operations.
Mr Streeting said there was “nothing Left-wing” about leaving working class patients to lie in pain because of “middle class Lefty” objections to the use of the private sector.
At the end of covid there was a scheme where the health authority paid for the first 4 weeks of Social Care, meaning that the patient would have that time to make more long term arrangements. I don't know why it ended, it was great value.
The shadow health secretary has said he would buy up private beds for the NHS, in defiance of objections from “middle-class Lefties”. Wes Streeting said a Labour government would get the NHS to buy thousands of beds from care homes, to “unblock” a failing health and care system, while expanding use of private hospitals for state-funded operations.
Mr Streeting said there was “nothing Left-wing” about leaving working class patients to lie in pain because of “middle class Lefty” objections to the use of the private sector.
I don't think the Labour top team has that much talent (certainly far below 1997), but so far he seems to be one of the better ones. Obviously proof is in the pudding.
"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.
🔵 Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, is set to run for the Conservative leadership if a contest is triggered next month by election defeat, The Telegraph understands
Given the numbers we're seeing in the polls the only thing he should be focusing on is retaining his seat and avoiding the Tory Apocalypse...
He believes in setting out his stall early - I think he mentioned he'd stand if Boris went, before it happened.
Well in this case the timing is all wrong and he's looking 1. arrogant in assuming he's still going to be around in the next Parliament and 2. self-indulgent.
Even now, after 3 PM's, 6 Chancellors, 12 home secretaries and facing the worst defeat in 200 years there are still Tory politicians that think it's all about them. It's inexplicable honestly. 🤷♂️
it depends on who fails to turn up in a low turnout situation. if it's mostly Tory Voters it could be a lot worse than this.
I think Labour’s biggest worry has to be that voters think the result is in the bag that they can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
Sure, but everything points to it being true that voters can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
I don’t know a single Labour or anti-Tory tactical voter who thinks the Labour win is in the bag. We are all terrified that the Tories will do what they’ve always done and spin something/creep a win.
"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?
I'm somewhat lothe to indulge your narcissism but I guess I owe you a response. I said you were extremely right wing, not that you were "extreme rightwing". That's just the impression I get from your posts, eg on "Muslim rape gangs", admiration for Putinist positions on gender and love of post fascist politicians like Giorgia Meloni, espousal of zero immigration, your war on woke, the fact you see a Thatcherite Brexiteer like Rishi Sunak as a wet, that you think people who work for the Tory party are lefties, your dislike of paying tax... I could go in but I won't as I don't find you quite as interey, but sting as you do. Why don't you do one of those political compass tests and see what it says? I am fairly sure it won't identify you as a libertarian socialist as it did for me. None of this is a value judgement BTW, you are welcome to your views, I simply struggle to see how you can be so unaware of where your opinions place you on the political scale.
In this slew of desperate gibberish one gem stands out: you accuse me of "disliking paying tax" as proof that I am a Nazi
I dunno, but I've got a weird feeling that makes Britain 98.94% Nazi
Leon you are arguing with yourself, as always, because at no point did I say you were a nazi. What is it they say about wrestling with a pig?
You said I am "extremely rightwing". I'm sorry, but there is no way that means anything other than "a Nazi" or "basically a Nazi" in the ears and eyes of any normal person. And yet you cannot back it up because it is bollocks. You are a reduced person. You are not even on my C list
No, seriously, ths is utter shite. You should resile or apologise, you are too feeble to do either
He didn’t call you a Nazi. He called you extremely right wing. You have expressed support for Reform which is, based on their employment law manifesto, which I’ve read for obvious reasons, a very very right wing organisation. It’s not defamatory when it can be described as fair comment. And the ordinary and natural meaning of “extremely right wing” is not Nazi. It could equally apply to a number of Tory MPs and the immediate past President of the United States.
The shadow health secretary has said he would buy up private beds for the NHS, in defiance of objections from “middle-class Lefties”. Wes Streeting said a Labour government would get the NHS to buy thousands of beds from care homes, to “unblock” a failing health and care system, while expanding use of private hospitals for state-funded operations.
Mr Streeting said there was “nothing Left-wing” about leaving working class patients to lie in pain because of “middle class Lefty” objections to the use of the private sector.
At the end of covid there was a scheme where the health authority paid for the first 4 weeks of Social Care, meaning that the patient would have that time to make more long term arrangements. I don't know why it ended, it was great value.
A relation got a council funded 6 week assessment period earlier in the year. Is that not standard? It seemed sensible. Maybe postcode lottery stuff.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
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
Forestry is usually counted as resource extraction rather than agriculture, isn't it?
What agricultural land there is in Finland is concentrated in the south, and along the western coast as far north as Oulu - but they do get very high production per hectare.
The huge contrast between Finnish and British agricultural productivity figures are mostly a result of the different attitudes towards land use - our previously forested lands are used for marginal hill farms and grouse moors etc.
Yup. Forests are counted as an asset and are capitalised.
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..
it depends on who fails to turn up in a low turnout situation. if it's mostly Tory Voters it could be a lot worse than this.
I think Labour’s biggest worry has to be that voters think the result is in the bag that they can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
Sure, but everything points to it being true that voters can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
I don’t know a single Labour or anti-Tory tactical voter who thinks the Labour win is in the bag. We are all terrified that the Tories will do what they’ve always done and spin something/creep a win.
You should talk with some Tories, your confidence in a Labour win will increase markedly.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
Dogged persistence seems to be a feature of narcissistic spectrum politicians, born I think of their incredibly thick skins and lack of self-doubt.
Farage, Galloway, Trump, Truss, Boris, Netanyahu, Assad, Corbyn, further back in time Neil Hamilton, Berlusconi…
Other normal politicians of both left and right give up after multiple setbacks and humiliations with their tails between their legs. Narcissists just keep going, until they finally get their way.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
🔵 Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, is set to run for the Conservative leadership if a contest is triggered next month by election defeat, The Telegraph understands
Their 32 MPs are gonna end up led by Tug-end-hat
And that will be their last meaningful leader ever. He will agree with everything Labour does and just pretend that the rump Tories will tax slightly less. This meaningless politics cannot continue. The Tories either become populist rightwing or they die
If they end up with 32 MPs, then a leadership ballot could be triggered by just 5 of them. We might well see more Tory leaders in the coming parliament than we did in the last...
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the 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.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
I’ve had pieces published in HR Magazine and Personnel Today. Does that count?
Off topic but I have noticed there are sometimes up to four Nigels in a thread (if we include Farage) and it's incredible to think it's literally extinct as a new baby name - or at least it was in 2020
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
it depends on who fails to turn up in a low turnout situation. if it's mostly Tory Voters it could be a lot worse than this.
I think Labour’s biggest worry has to be that voters think the result is in the bag that they can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
Sure, but everything points to it being true that voters can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
I don’t know a single Labour or anti-Tory tactical voter who thinks the Labour win is in the bag. We are all terrified that the Tories will do what they’ve always done and spin something/creep a win.
If I was Starmer I would be hoping for a poll showing Lab only 3 points ahead as otherwise there will be a lot who won't vote tactically or bother to vote at all on the grounds it is a shoo in.
For all the opinion polls, it has to be remembered that with the tory majority of 80 combined with the SNP in Scotland and the boundary changes, Starmer needs a swing like Blair got to get a majority.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
"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?
Genuine poshos might go Liberal rather than Tory or at a push Green if really bohemian but Labour has far too working class a heritage for most poshos to vote for
Wasn't it said that our current King wanted to join the Labour group at Uni?
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in 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.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
I’ve had pieces published in HR Magazine and Personnel Today. Does that count?
Dunno. Next time I'm in the office I'd have to look to see if you contributed to the magazines I never read.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
I’ve had pieces published in HR Magazine and Personnel Today. Does that count?
"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?
Genuine poshos might go Liberal rather than Tory or at a push Green if really bohemian but Labour has far too working class a heritage for most poshos to vote for
Wasn't it said that our current King wanted to join the Labour group at Uni?
Not sure they are left wing enough for him. The Greens I can see.
I am always amused by when the courts forced the released of the letter to the government he sent under the last Labour government and that the Guardian fought toe and nail to get...only to find he was incredibly annoying spending constant letter asking ministers if they were aware of the plight of the lesser spotted Amazonian bull frog and what did they intend to do about it.
Boost for Farage, but also a boost for the Greens - BBC has added another Question Time Special - and it's in prime time - BBC1 8pm Friday 28 June. No Euros that night.
And this will be one of, if not the last main GE programmes.
Farage is also doing the Nick Robinson interview which he previously pulled out of.
Off topic but I have noticed there are sometimes up to four Nigels in a thread (if we include Farage) and it's incredible to think it's literally extinct as a new baby name - or at least it was in 2020
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
If he does win Clacton hopefully he'll be the on REF MP and Con will retain enough MP's to be able to tell him to **** off once and for all.
I'd give him six months knocking around the backbenches as a lone George Galloway type figure before he'd be buggering off to America to have his ego stroked there...
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
The one thing very clear is that he doesn’t do deputy
"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?
Genuine poshos might go Liberal rather than Tory or at a push Green if really bohemian but Labour has far too working class a heritage for most poshos to vote for
Wasn't it said that our current King wanted to join the Labour group at Uni?
The King is prime LD or Green voter, you can join all the political societies at uni
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
I’ve had pieces published in HR Magazine and Personnel Today. Does that count?
One of my prouder moments was a page 3 article in the FT (about 500 words iirc) two weeks into a month-long placement as a dogsbody there. And the subs even used the headline I'd actually written.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
The one thing very clear is that he doesn’t do deputy
One thing that is clear is he is happy to nominally not be in charge, until he is ready to take over officially.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
it depends on who fails to turn up in a low turnout situation. if it's mostly Tory Voters it could be a lot worse than this.
I think Labour’s biggest worry has to be that voters think the result is in the bag that they can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
Sure, but everything points to it being true that voters can stay at home or vote LD/Green/SNP/Reform without risking the landslide.
I don’t know a single Labour or anti-Tory tactical voter who thinks the Labour win is in the bag. We are all terrified that the Tories will do what they’ve always done and spin something/creep a win.
If I was Starmer I would be hoping for a poll showing Lab only 3 points ahead as otherwise there will be a lot who won't vote tactically or bother to vote at all on the grounds it is a shoo in.
For all the opinion polls, it has to be remembered that with the tory majority of 80 combined with the SNP in Scotland and the boundary changes, Starmer needs a swing like Blair got to get a majority.
I don’t think he would be hoping for such a poll as that would mean he’d be heading for a hung Parliament or worse anyway
This is the second constituency poll of the campaign, both for The Economist. Both the Hartlepool and the Gillingham constituency polls suggest the polls and MRPs are being significantly too generous to the Conservatives.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
If he does win Clacton hopefully he'll be the on REF MP and Con will retain enough MP's to be able to tell him to **** off once and for all.
I'd give him six months knocking around the backbenches as a lone George Galloway type figure before he'd be buggering off to America to have his ego stroked there...
The number of MPs is relevant I think, but the ratio of Reform to Conservative MPs not so much.
By which I mean if the Tories are very low in seats they will probably still have way more than Reform, but will be so brutally damaged merger will seem the only viable option. At which point Farage wields the whip hand regardless of having few MPs, and he genuinely could take charge.
If the Tories retain a substantial number of MPs, say over 100, then they will be desperate to cut a deal with Reform, but merger will not be on the table.
🔵 Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, is set to run for the Conservative leadership if a contest is triggered next month by election defeat, The Telegraph understands
Given the numbers we're seeing in the polls the only thing he should be focusing on is retaining his seat and avoiding the Tory Apocalypse...
Indeed, especially as Mori has Labour winning Tonbridge by 1%. It has lost some of the rural Mallings and culturally is much closer to the Kentish Medway towns, almost all all forecast to go back to Labour as they did in 1997 than posher spa town Tunbridge Wells and wealthy commuter belt Sevenoaks (outside of the bit round the castle and my alma mater Tonbridge school).
Indeed if Tugendhat is re elected it will be wealthy villages in Sevenoaks district but Tonbridge constituency like Penshurst and Chiddingstone and Hever that do it for him rather than the town itself which may go Labour
Off topic but I have noticed there are sometimes up to four Nigels in a thread (if we include Farage) and it's incredible to think it's literally extinct as a new baby name - or at least it was in 2020
Off topic but I have noticed there are sometimes up to four Nigels in a thread (if we include Farage) and it's incredible to think it's literally extinct as a new baby name - or at least it was in 2020
Are you proposing a “Nigel quota”? Here or nationwide?
"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?
I'm somewhat lothe to indulge your narcissism but I guess I owe you a response. I said you were extremely right wing, not that you were "extreme rightwing". That's just the impression I get from your posts, eg on "Muslim rape gangs", admiration for Putinist positions on gender and love of post fascist politicians like Giorgia Meloni, espousal of zero immigration, your war on woke, the fact you see a Thatcherite Brexiteer like Rishi Sunak as a wet, that you think people who work for the Tory party are lefties, your dislike of paying tax... I could go in but I won't as I don't find you quite as interesting as you do. Why don't you do one of those political compass tests and see what it says? I am fairly sure it won't identify you as a libertarian socialist as it did for me. None of this is a value judgement BTW, you are welcome to your views, I simply struggle to see how you can be so unaware of where your opinions place you on the political scale.
Leon in May: “The young really ARE stupider, and here we see that evidenced. Part of this can be blamed on migration from less cognitively blessed areas of the world, and of course by the multiple impacts of Covid and lockdown - but not all of it”
That’s not the first time he’s made clear his out-and-out racism, his view that different human “races” have very different genetic traits, including that affect intelligence.
Is it a Hitlerite rumour that some parts of the world have less impressive education systems than others? How is that Nazi?
if you import people from Denmark or Singapore there's a good chance they are highly educated and have degrees. Somalia or Peru, less so
You said cognitively, not educationally. They’re different.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
Perhaps they could go the Co-operative Party route?
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
If he does win Clacton hopefully he'll be the on REF MP and Con will retain enough MP's to be able to tell him to **** off once and for all.
I'd give him six months knocking around the backbenches as a lone George Galloway type figure before he'd be buggering off to America to have his ego stroked there...
The number of MPs is relevant I think, but the ratio of Reform to Conservative MPs not so much.
By which I mean if the Tories are very low in seats they will probably still have way more than Reform, but will be so brutally damaged merger will seem the only viable option. At which point Farage wields the whip hand regardless of having few MPs, and he genuinely could take charge.
If the Tories retain a substantial number of MPs, say over 100, then they will be desperate to cut a deal with Reform, but merger will not be on the table.
Really can’t see this. Although logical, logic plays a small part in politics.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
I had a read of the reform manifesto. It has just been 'launched' but actually the policies have been up on the Reform website for months almost word for word. It is the manifesto that the tories desperately wanted to write and has a lot of very solid, popular stuff in it - (but let down mainly by the pro motorist nonsense - something the tories are also guilty of). I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
🔵 Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, is set to run for the Conservative leadership if a contest is triggered next month by election defeat, The Telegraph understands
Their 32 MPs are gonna end up led by Tug-end-hat
And that will be their last meaningful leader ever. He will agree with everything Labour does and just pretend that the rump Tories will tax slightly less. This meaningless politics cannot continue. The Tories either become populist rightwing or they die
How does he know he will still be in parliament?
87% of his new seat is made up of his old seat, where he had a majority over 26k.
No Tory is safe, but he's got better reason to think he might win than most.
Being a one nation Tory as opposed to a Reform tribute act may help save his skin.
"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?
Genuine poshos might go Liberal rather than Tory or at a push Green if really bohemian but Labour has far too working class a heritage for most poshos to vote for
Wasn't it said that our current King wanted to join the Labour group at Uni?
My experience is very similar to Leon's. It's easy to be socialist if you're so rich you don't care. And similarly it's the most greasy social climbers from noveau riche (or indeed not even riche) backgrounds that are the ones wanking around with waistcoats and shit.
I remember at Cambridge being invited in to the PItt Club a couple of times (which was by then mostly a Pizza Express - even the Champagne came from there, just in an ice bucket) and while there was indeed still a remarkable level of what those types would call "totty" I think they were very disappointed (they seemed to spend most of their time in what were unisex toilets - ahead of the game!) and the "chaps" playing Brideshead Revisted were an absolute joke.
The "worst" of the offenders - who used to brag about going to Tonbridge - now spends his life posting on Facebook about his evenings in Tattersall's in Brisbaine. Which also tends to looks very empty on his photos, even though he could probably convince Australians he was a sophisititicant. Very odd the pretending to be upper class thing. I'll continue drinking hoegarden and taking the other sides of their bets around election time thanks. Speaking of which, anyone any tips?
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
I suspect Nigel would just pull the plug on Reform and tell his disciples that it's now fine to support the Tory Party because he now is it. (I doubt Tice would feature whatsoever in such calculations.)
Putting aside Chomsky politics, his academic work is really interesting. But with LLMs, there is real debate in academic circles if actually it was all wrong.
Indeed. But he's still a giant in the field of linguistics. Even if he was almost entirely wrong. He pushed the study forward in a similar way to Freud in Psychiatry. By producing a revolutionary theory which fit with available evidence at the time.
How was he wrong in hindsight?
Largely AIUI his critique of Behaviourism, which was the dominant idea of the time. The idea that an input led to a predictable output mentally. He united several fields of study and brought them together under Cognitive Science (the study of the mind). He was far from alone in this, but on language acquisition, his field, his was the strongest critique. The idea that we are pre programmed with grammar and the tools for language before birth has been chipped away at. And recent AI advances suggest he was entirely wrong. But nobody is going back to behaviourism. He's super important in the antithesis bit of the Hegelian Thesis/antithesis/synthesis theory of mind. Epigenetics and particularly inherited trauma bear some of his major ideas out.
TL:DR. The mind's a lot more complex than all that.
Off topic but I have noticed there are sometimes up to four Nigels in a thread (if we include Farage) and it's incredible to think it's literally extinct as a new baby name - or at least it was in 2020
Would you want your son to be named after Farage? AFAIK there were very few boys named Adolf after 1945.
This is the second constituency poll of the campaign, both for The Economist. Both the Hartlepool and the Gillingham constituency polls suggest the polls and MRPs are being significantly too generous to the Conservatives.
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
I had a read of the reform manifesto. It has just been 'launched' but actually the policies have been up on the Reform website for months almost word for word. It is the manifesto that the tories desperately wanted to write and has a lot of very solid, popular stuff in it - (but let down mainly by the pro motorist nonsense - something the tories are also guilty of). I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
I don’t think their proposals to effectively abolish the right to paid holiday and maternity leave, amongst the other bonfire of employment right, are that popular. Labour would be all over that.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
Perhaps they could go the Co-operative Party route?
CDU/CSU. More separate and regionalised. Reform gets the red wall and Essex.
There are several different MRPs, and they are different enough that they can't all be as impressively right as the technique was when it first emerged. Ultimately it's still vulnerable to the main problem afflicting regular opinion polls - getting hold of a decent sample. And then the second main problem - people who lie to themselves about their intentions can't help doing the same to a pollster.
So that's at least one overseas vote not going to the Conservatives. 2,999,999 still up for grabs though.
He just wants public money to help redevelop Old Trafford. Parasite.
Fake news.
He wants to unlock a massive development in Trafford which would require significant public investment to improve freight rail and other national infrastructure.
I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
No
The further right they go chasing the votes of closet racists and swivel eyed loons the more seats they lose.
They should have told Nige and all his fanboys to fuck off. Again.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
I had a read of the reform manifesto. It has just been 'launched' but actually the policies have been up on the Reform website for months almost word for word. It is the manifesto that the tories desperately wanted to write and has a lot of very solid, popular stuff in it - (but let down mainly by the pro motorist nonsense - something the tories are also guilty of). I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
I really don't see how that could be considered a blunder - merger with Reform was not on the table, since the thing many Tories even seem to forget is that Farage and Reform were and are opponents of theirs, onces who want to damage or even overtake them. They were not seeking accomodation.
What incentive would Farage have had to withdraw the threat his party posed when they had nothing to offer him?
After he has helped bring the Tories to an historic defeat, they can, he would hope, give him direct influence over the direction of the main opposition, not just indirect influence.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
Perhaps they could go the Co-operative Party route?
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
I had a read of the reform manifesto. It has just been 'launched' but actually the policies have been up on the Reform website for months almost word for word. It is the manifesto that the tories desperately wanted to write and has a lot of very solid, popular stuff in it - (but let down mainly by the pro motorist nonsense - something the tories are also guilty of). I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
I don’t think their proposals to effectively abolish the right to paid holiday and maternity leave, amongst the other bonfire of employment right, are that popular. Labour would be all over that.
Apart from being anti immigration, I think their policies will be deeply unpopular.
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.
Part if it was having an educated population prepared to work long hours for low pay, for many decades. The Korean 'miracle' didn't really start until the 80s.
City states like Singapore and Hong Kong aren't really comparable.
"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
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
I had a read of the reform manifesto. It has just been 'launched' but actually the policies have been up on the Reform website for months almost word for word. It is the manifesto that the tories desperately wanted to write and has a lot of very solid, popular stuff in it - (but let down mainly by the pro motorist nonsense - something the tories are also guilty of). I cannot avoid the conclusion that the historic blunder the conservatives have made is not merging with the Reform party, dumping the centrists, and going in to opposition with 200+ seats.
Is it still promising a review of supposed vaccine harms? I know it still talks about the World Economic Forum.
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
Perhaps they could go the Co-operative Party route?
CDU/CSU. More separate and regionalised. Reform gets the red wall and Essex.
Reform actually is projected to do better in areas like Gt Yarmouth, SE Cornwall and East Kent as well as the redwall than the posher parts of Essex like Chelmsford and NW Essex
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.”
Something big is happening. Nigel will be an MP after July 5th.
Cue sea of old people jokes.
But in all seriousness people finally seem ready to put Farage into the Commons. He's been an important political figure for a long time, it will be interesting to see how he adapts to the role, or if he still spends his time licking boots in the United States.
He could be Tory Deputy Leader by Christmas.
He's not going to accept being deputy anything is he?
Merely a stepping stone, after a Tory Reform merger in which the Tories were the largest portion. He'd then make his move in time.
How would a merger work? The Tories are, at least nominally, a member-based organisation. Reform are basically just Farage and Tice.
Perhaps they could go the Co-operative Party route?
CDU/CSU. More separate and regionalised. Reform gets the red wall and Essex.
Reform actually is projected to do better in areas like Gt Yarmouth and East Kent as well as the redwall than the posher parts of Essex like Chelmsford and NW Essex
Their vote likely correlates strongly with lower levels of educational attainment
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
Wasn't Howard stuffed by Widdy's 'Something of the night' barb?
There are several different MRPs, and they are different enough that they can't all be as impressively right as the technique was when it first emerged. Ultimately it's still vulnerable to the main problem afflicting regular opinion polls - getting hold of a decent sample. And then the second main problem - people who lie to themselves about their intentions can't help doing the same to a pollster.
Apart from the one just before the 2017 their results have been poor.
They are interesting, but just another projection.
"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
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
It seems more politically sustainable than free migration from the third world, which hasn't been sustainable in any rich country. A bit like the people who want world government, it seems like vaunting the best (maybe) as the enemy of the good.
It is no longer possible to construct the concept of a Noam Chomsky, although the possibility of an unconstructed or deconstructed Noam Chomsky - uninstantiated if you will - remains.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
Not sure about that. Tugendhat comes across as likeable and level-headed. Military bsckground won't harm him either. Could appeal to Tory members wanting an end to chaos, and someone they, and the public can identify with, as a slightly old-fashioned, if not old (he's 50) public servant-type Tory.
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
What happens if one member votes for Tugendhat and the other one votes for Barclay?
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..
The other thing to state about writing ref. earlier discussions is that you need never retire. If your brain/body stays fit you can write until you drop. It’s good for keeping the mind active and if you love it, keep at it.
If you are paid £1 or £2 a word you are one of the better paid jpurnalists on Fleet Street, and therefore one of the more noticeable. It's weird I cannot recognise your style. Do you specialise in a certain field?
Yes. And no. But I’m amused you refer to ‘Fleet Street’
I don’t have a weekly column by the way. Pieces from time to time, often on commission when they sense a juicy topic for me to write up.
I’ll leave it there but if anyone outs me on here you won’t ever see me again. I like to keep it anon and I hope that can be respected.
xx
No chance of that. All journos on this site are incredibly well disguised.
I’ve had pieces published in HR Magazine and Personnel Today. Does that count?
I got Star Letter in Cats Today once.
I won a caption competition in The Chemical Engineer.
"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
You do know that net zero migration is completely mental, yes? We'd be better off with Truss and PM and Corbyn as Chancellor. You want runaway inflation and the collapse of half the public and private services in the country? That's what Farage is offering.
To be fair being 'completely mental' is not necessarily the same as being far right. Some of Corbyn's ideas, plenty of the Green ideas and even some of the main party ideas can be considerd 'completely mental' but they would not be considered right wing.
You are conflating two completely separate, although not always exclusive, arguments.
No argument from me. There's a problem with identifying racist authoritarians as right wing and identifying hardcore liberals as left wing. My only point here is zero NET migration is completely loopy.
So what is YOUR target for net migration, or do you have no target at all? Do you let everyone in? Let no one in? What is it? Come on, try and answer, if you come up with something coherent and articulate and sensible you might even get a column on "The National" paying £15 per 1000 words
Rejoin EU, freedom of movement.
5 words, that'll be 7.5 pence, please.
But only for nice white Europeans?
You're better than that quip. EU freedom of movement isn't conditional on race.
No but it is conditional on being a citizen of a predominantly white and wealthy bloc of countries. If people are so in favour of freedom of movement then it should not apply only to those fortunate enough to live in a small caucasian portion of the first world.
That’s entirely illogical. Why are the only options free movement within the British Isles or free movement in the whole world?
p.s. re Tugendhat, if the tories do go to a 1997 or worse, remember what happened after that one. The young new darling of the party, William Hague, took on the leadership at the wrong time and when the inevitable happened in 2001, he went.
Hague should have backed Howard in 1997, let him take the 2001 landslide defeat, then he would likely have been the next leader not IDS. He could have cut Labour's majority in 2005, been young enough to stay leader and then beaten Brown in 2010 and become PM rather than Cameron. He did everything CV wise to become PM but tactically made a huge error politically.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
Not sure about that. Tugendhat comes across as likeable and level-headed. Military bsckground won't harm him either. Could appeal to Tory members wanting an end to chaos, and someone they, and the public can identify with, as a slightly old-fashioned, if not old (he's 50) public servant-type Tory.
He was too much of a Remainer to win it though yes he likely gets 45%
Comments
Errrr....
if you import people from Denmark or Singapore there's a good chance they are highly educated and have degrees. Somalia or Peru, less so
At the end of covid there was a scheme where the health authority paid for the first 4 weeks of Social Care, meaning that the patient would have that time to make more long term arrangements. I don't know why it ended, it was great value.
Even now, after 3 PM's, 6 Chancellors, 12 home secretaries and facing the worst defeat in 200 years there are still Tory politicians that think it's all about them. It's inexplicable honestly. 🤷♂️
I don’t know a single Labour or anti-Tory tactical voter who thinks the Labour win is in the bag. We are all terrified that the Tories will do what they’ve always done and spin something/creep a win.
Farage, Galloway, Trump, Truss, Boris, Netanyahu, Assad, Corbyn, further back in time Neil Hamilton, Berlusconi…
Other normal politicians of both left and right give up after multiple setbacks and humiliations with their tails between their legs. Narcissists just keep going, until they finally get their way.
Grn 36%
Con 30%
Lab 15%
Ref 13%
LD 5%
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-opinion-polls/ipsos-election-mrp
Well, it is much debated. Many linguists and psychologists think it’s wrong, but others still support the idea.
For all the opinion polls, it has to be remembered that with the tory majority of 80 combined with the SNP in Scotland and the boundary changes, Starmer needs a swing like Blair got to get a majority.
I am always amused by when the courts forced the released of the letter to the government he sent under the last Labour government and that the Guardian fought toe and nail to get...only to find he was incredibly annoying spending constant letter asking ministers if they were aware of the plight of the lesser spotted Amazonian bull frog and what did they intend to do about it.
And this will be one of, if not the last main GE programmes.
Farage is also doing the Nick Robinson interview which he previously pulled out of.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2024/additional-question-time-leaders-special-and-scheduling-changes-to-panorama-interviews
I'd give him six months knocking around the backbenches as a lone George Galloway type figure before he'd be buggering off to America to have his ego stroked there...
https://www.registertovote.service.gov.uk/performance
This is the second constituency poll of the campaign, both for The Economist. Both the Hartlepool and the Gillingham constituency polls suggest the polls and MRPs are being significantly too generous to the Conservatives.
By which I mean if the Tories are very low in seats they will probably still have way more than Reform, but will be so brutally damaged merger will seem the only viable option. At which point Farage wields the whip hand regardless of having few MPs, and he genuinely could take charge.
If the Tories retain a substantial number of MPs, say over 100, then they will be desperate to cut a deal with Reform, but merger will not be on the table.
Indeed if Tugendhat is re elected it will be wealthy villages in Sevenoaks district but Tonbridge constituency like Penshurst and Chiddingstone and Hever that do it for him rather than the town itself which may go Labour
I remember at Cambridge being invited in to the PItt Club a couple of times (which was by then mostly a Pizza Express - even the Champagne came from there, just in an ice bucket) and while there was indeed still a remarkable level of what those types would call "totty" I think they were very disappointed (they seemed to spend most of their time in what were unisex toilets - ahead of the game!) and the "chaps" playing Brideshead Revisted were an absolute joke.
The "worst" of the offenders - who used to brag about going to Tonbridge - now spends his life posting on Facebook about his evenings in Tattersall's in Brisbaine. Which also tends to looks very empty on his photos, even though he could probably convince Australians he was a sophisititicant. Very odd the pretending to be upper class thing. I'll continue drinking hoegarden and taking the other sides of their bets around election time thanks. Speaking of which, anyone any tips?
He united several fields of study and brought them together under Cognitive Science (the study of the mind). He was far from alone in this, but on language acquisition, his field, his was the strongest critique.
The idea that we are pre programmed with grammar and the tools for language before birth has been chipped away at. And recent AI advances suggest he was entirely wrong.
But nobody is going back to behaviourism. He's super important in the antithesis bit of the Hegelian Thesis/antithesis/synthesis theory of mind.
Epigenetics and particularly inherited trauma bear some of his major ideas out.
TL:DR. The mind's a lot more complex than all that.
Ignore, for betting purposes.
His genocide denials were indeed rather Irving-esque. Cambodia, FFS.
He wants to unlock a massive development in Trafford which would require significant public investment to improve freight rail and other national infrastructure.
Gillingham & Rainham voting intention (+/- 5%, changes vs 2019 notional)
LAB: 55% (+27)
CON: 23% (-39)
REF: 15% (+15)
LDEM: 5% (=)
GRN: 2% (=)
My god. Worth noting this has a swing way beyond anything that the MRPs are picking up.
Looking at @Samfr database of projections this has Labour outperforming the most bullish MRP by 11% and Tories under by 6%.
Similar to Hartlepool and way outside MoE. Just one poll but...
The further right they go chasing the votes of closet racists and swivel eyed loons the more seats they lose.
They should have told Nige and all his fanboys to fuck off. Again.
I suspect Barclay is more likely the next Tory leader than Tugendhat anyway once it gets to the members
What incentive would Farage have had to withdraw the threat his party posed when they had nothing to offer him?
After he has helped bring the Tories to an historic defeat, they can, he would hope, give him direct influence over the direction of the main opposition, not just indirect influence.
The Korean 'miracle' didn't really start until the 80s.
City states like Singapore and Hong Kong aren't really comparable.
Seeing how nothing works in this country under the Tories it probably will.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/18/hundreds-of-hajj-pilgrims-die-in-mecca-from-heat-related-illness
Sir Jim who moved to Monaco to save - checks - £4bn in taxes.
And he's lecturing other people about paying their taxes?
What a total fucking scumbag.
They are interesting, but just another projection.