I just got a fake phishing email with a Keir Starmer (not) joke at the end of it from CCHQ. Looks like it was written by a 12-year old, and, even if I agree with it's central premise that he's being deceitful on tax, it's still a cringeworthy begging letter.
Please. Make it stop.
At this stage, the only people voting Tory are doing so in wilful defiance of Rishi “Danger” Sunak, James “Two Brains” Forsyth, and Isaac “Hannibal” Levido.
I really rated James Forsyth as a political journalist.
So did I, but his utility was solely down to his friend and familial connections. Post-Sunak he will find it difficult.
Really? He was a thing in political journalism long before Sunak was a thing in politics and before Allegra Stratton was his wife. He set up Coffee House in the speccy for example in 2007 and editor in 2009.
I just got a fake phishing email with a Keir Starmer (not) joke at the end of it from CCHQ. Looks like it was written by a 12-year old, and, even if I agree with it's central premise that he's being deceitful on tax, it's still a cringeworthy begging letter.
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Nice steel museums, actually; when I went one of the had leaflets for a selfguided walk to see the local steelmaking heritage.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
If the Greens ended up with zero seats I don't think it would be that surprising - loss of the Lucas personal vote in Brighton, plus the problems with the council, falling just short in Bristol Central being a harsh lesson in the difference between local and national elections, t'other seats demonstrating that Tory voters are a bit more conservative about changing their view then they often seem.
Two seats might be more likely than zero, but I wouldn't rule zero out.
But again, everything I'm hearing from canvas returns in Brighton - where they are specifically talking to typical Green voters and Labour voters - is that we're performing better than usual because those voters in Brighton who typically vote Labour are more willing to vote Green this election. But that could easily be the blinders of partisan campaigning
Labour 55%, Conservative 22%, LD 10%, Reform 8%, Greens 5%.
Since 2019, that's Labour +6, Conservative -10, LD -5, Reform +6.5, Green +2
A swing of 8% from Conservative to Labour and 2.5% from Conservative to Liberal Democrat so not the big moves we've seen in other parts of the country. We did see from the Holborn & St Pancras poll yesterday some Green strength and Labour weakness in Inner London and I expect we're seeing stronger Labour scores in Outer London.
Just to remind you, I have the following London bets:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
Apart from Croydon East, which has gone - I'm concerned about Harrow East but I'm happy with the other five and while we can see the Conservatives being reduced from the 21 sats they won last time down to single figures, I don't see a wipeout on these numbers.
This poll is the perfect illustration of what's going on at this election. The reason the Tories are down so much overall is because of a swing to Ref, but because Farage's party is much less popular in London, the Tories are correspondingly doing much better. On the other hand, Lab +6 is pretty much the same as the rest of the country.
My own view that Harrow East will be a Conservative hold, due to its ethnic make up.
Bury St Edmunds is very very close according to all the MRPs.
As it should be given we are heading for a 1997 landslide defeat for the Tories at best and in 1997 the Tory majority in Bury St Edmunds was just 368.
I think Tanner will hold on though, he has some connections to the area at least unlike Holden in Basildon and Billericay who I think will lose, his family are Suffolk farmers. So while Labour probably edge it in the city itself Tanner should win enough of the rural part of the constituency to win it overall
Bury isn't a city, its a town, a quite small one
It should be, one of only 3 towns in the UK with a cathedral that does not have city status and it has an old Abbey as well.
Though you are right, apologies
It's always mooted as a contender when new city opps appear. It's a very pleasant little town though
Retirement home of Lord Tebbit too (who may vote Reform I expect)
I would hope not, young HY. Not if he is a member of the House of Lords.....
His house is in the close, I didn't say he was in a care home
He is a peer, is he not? So ...
The lunches and claret are rather better in the Lords than your average care home...
But irrelevant to whether he can vote in the election. Which I'm sure was ClippP's point.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Lab gets a landslide and a decade in power, Con survive and have something to rebuild from, Lib returns to being the third biggest party, Green hang on to their seat and Nige arrives in Westminster on how own and resigns Clacton to peruse a lucrative career in America by Christmas.
Everyone's happy/relieved? Except for the SNP?
Don't think we should predict a decade in power for Labour just yet, even if they win a majority of a zillion. The electorate have been incredibly volatile these last few elections. The Tories won a 80 seat majority just 5 years ago after all, and now.........
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Parts of it are. But, the Hallam constituency is a place of incredible attractiveness and wealth, leading up to some outstandingly beautiful countryside.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
A shrinking pie means violent conflict over resources.
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Sheffield is the loveliest of the UK's industrial big cities. I fell in love with it as soon as I first visited. Of course, it helps that I was coming from the west. So you arrive in the city through a succession of very pleasant stone built suburbs. More than any other city, Sheffield is sectorised, with the best areas in the west and south west. But it means you can, if you want, walk from the Peak District to the city centre in about an hour and get the impression of the pleasantest and best-ordered city in the country. It's all pleasantly prosperous. Of course, this is a very partial view and you get quite a different impression if you arrive from the South East (still not actually grotty, but definitely not prosperous).
The city centre used to be a little grim, but has regenerated itself better than pretty much anywhere else in the country and is now very pleasant indeed, albeit a little lacking in retail opportunities for a city of its size.
I just got a fake phishing email with a Keir Starmer (not) joke at the end of it from CCHQ. Looks like it was written by a 12-year old, and, even if I agree with it's central premise that he's being deceitful on tax, it's still a cringeworthy begging letter.
Please. Make it stop.
Can some party activists not launch a coup at CCHQ? March in, round the idiots up and expel them from the building?
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
If the Greens ended up with zero seats I don't think it would be that surprising - loss of the Lucas personal vote in Brighton, plus the problems with the council, falling just short in Bristol Central being a harsh lesson in the difference between local and national elections, t'other seats demonstrating that Tory voters are a bit more conservative about changing their view then they often seem.
Two seats might be more likely than zero, but I wouldn't rule zero out.
But again, everything I'm hearing from canvas returns in Brighton - where they are specifically talking to typical Green voters and Labour voters - is that we're performing better than usual because those voters in Brighton who typically vote Labour are more willing to vote Green this election. But that could easily be the blinders of partisan campaigning
A pity Carlotta hasn't been about for a bit - she is based in Brighton IIRC. Would be great to hear her perspective on the ground campaign.
I love France to bits but CDG is so chaotically designed.
I shake my head at you.
You need to get out of Leeds more.
Leeds?
I am a globalist.
You've been to York!
During one of the more bizarre phases of the Covid regulations, a lot of people were travelling from Leeds to York. The pubs were shut in Leeds, but open in York.
In unrelated news, there was an increase in Covid cases in York shortly thereafter.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's quite possible to be both fleeing persecution and looking for the optimum destination. Consider: if you were forced to flee the UK, would you be happy to stay in any random, albeit safe, country, or would you try to get to a place where you already had some connection?
What someone wants and what someone gets are often not the same thing.
If someone is forced to seek asylum then yes any random, albeit safe, country provides that.
If someone desires to migrate to the UK specifically that then desire should be processed the same as every other potential migrant who specifically desires to migrate here, for whatever reason.
From my understanding - that isn't the law. The law does allow for some "shopping" of where to go - for the exact reasons others have mentioned.
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Sheffield is the loveliest of the UK's industrial big cities. I fell in love with it as soon as I first visited. Of course, it helps that I was coming from the west. So you arrive in the city through a succession of very pleasant stone built suburbs. More than any other city, Sheffield is sectorised, with the best areas in the west and south west. But it means you can, if you want, walk from the Peak District to the city centre in about an hour and get the impression of the pleasantest and best-ordered city in the country. It's all pleasantly prosperous. Of course, this is a very partial view and you get quite a different impression if you arrive from the South East (still not actually grotty, but definitely not prosperous).
The city centre used to be a little grim, but has regenerated itself better than pretty much anywhere else in the country and is now very pleasant indeed, albeit a little lacking in retail opportunities for a city of its size.
Industrial big city wise I much prefer Glasgow. Sheffield feels disjointed, especially in the centre.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's an interesting question this, because I think our failure to understand humans as 3 dimensional beings means we put people into mutually exclusive groups like bona fide asylum seekers, economic migrants, illegals etc. In reality people will have a mixture of motivations for leaving a country and going elsewhere. Fear of violence might well be combined with hope for a better life for their children.
I'd take as illustrations of this some of the asylum seekers my parents spend time with at the reception centre near their village. One family: Iranian, 2 parents and a young daughter. They left because the husband was imprisoned for a couple of years for blasphemy-related crimes and beaten up a few times by regime thugs, but they are also intensely ambitious for their daughter who by all accounts is a bit of a child prodigy. She will go far, and will have opportunities here that she would never have had in Iran.
They came across in a small boat as that was the only viable option, though nowhere near the cheapest. They first had to get out of Iran without the authorities noticing. Why come to the UK? Because they had relatives here. Could they have fled to Turkey or Azerbaijan or Armenia and just stayed there? Probably, but the new life would be a very different one, quite possibly under canvas.
And rightly or wrongly from our point of view it is not what we offer the world. We do not have asylum laws that demand people claim asylum in their first safe country, thats just a newspaper myth that gets repeated endlessly. If thats what we want we need to change our laws and accept that means we cant be part of ECHR. Or take a longer route and lobby for change in ECHR.
Lets give up with the pretence whatever we decide.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
My head canon says between 0 and 4 Green seats. They are wildly overperforming but I think are slowly shedding support: peaked too early. We will see.
I just think the support is highly localised and therefore difficult to predict based on national polling. We are having some of our best national polls, though, to be honest - and whilst hypothetical polling is always suspect, the Greens do well when asking people how they would vote if we had PR / knew that whoever they voted for was going to win. I think if the Greens start making gains we might be well placed for sustainable growth - but whether we can turn into a real contender or end up like the LDs as "the third / fourth" party - I don't know.
Last time I was at CDG I remember coming down an escalator into a holding area that was far too small, and since the escalator was crowded with passengers it almost caused a dangerous crush at the bottom. Very poor design. They may have improved it since then.
They haven’t.
It suffers from a general French propensity to “design for design’s sake” in defiance of actual utility. This, despite a great tradition in engineering.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's quite possible to be both fleeing persecution and looking for the optimum destination. Consider: if you were forced to flee the UK, would you be happy to stay in any random, albeit safe, country, or would you try to get to a place where you already had some connection?
What someone wants and what someone gets are often not the same thing.
If someone is forced to seek asylum then yes any random, albeit safe, country provides that.
If someone desires to migrate to the UK specifically that then desire should be processed the same as every other potential migrant who specifically desires to migrate here, for whatever reason.
From my understanding - that isn't the law. The law does allow for some "shopping" of where to go - for the exact reasons others have mentioned.
The law allows you to claim asylum in the country you are in, and it doesn't ask how you got to that country. There's no requirement to claim asylum in the first country you come to, but there was an EU scheme to encourage that... but we left the EU.
Last time I was at CDG I remember coming down an escalator into a holding area that was far too small, and since the escalator was crowded with passengers it almost caused a dangerous crush at the bottom. Very poor design. They may have improved it since then.
They haven’t.
It suffers from a general French propensity to “design for design’s sake” in defiance of actual utility. This, despite a great tradition in engineering.
Why on earth not take the train.
Some of us have to go to, and change, in London. (Which was going to become worse with HS2. Which now will be much worse with OOC as the terminal.)
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Sheffield is the loveliest of the UK's industrial big cities. I fell in love with it as soon as I first visited. Of course, it helps that I was coming from the west. So you arrive in the city through a succession of very pleasant stone built suburbs. More than any other city, Sheffield is sectorised, with the best areas in the west and south west. But it means you can, if you want, walk from the Peak District to the city centre in about an hour and get the impression of the pleasantest and best-ordered city in the country. It's all pleasantly prosperous. Of course, this is a very partial view and you get quite a different impression if you arrive from the South East (still not actually grotty, but definitely not prosperous).
The city centre used to be a little grim, but has regenerated itself better than pretty much anywhere else in the country and is now very pleasant indeed, albeit a little lacking in retail opportunities for a city of its size.
All I've seen of it is Bramall Lane unfortunately!
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Sheffield is the one large UK city I haven’t been to. In my imagination it is the rocky, sylvan “Gateway to the Peaks”. A kind of Yorkshire Grenoble, with the iconic Park Hill flats, the storied Peace Garden, and the world-famous Documentary Festival. Small children ferry bottles of Henderson’s Relish from chip shop to chip shop.
In reality it’s probably a shit-hole.
Sheffield is the loveliest of the UK's industrial big cities. I fell in love with it as soon as I first visited. Of course, it helps that I was coming from the west. So you arrive in the city through a succession of very pleasant stone built suburbs. More than any other city, Sheffield is sectorised, with the best areas in the west and south west. But it means you can, if you want, walk from the Peak District to the city centre in about an hour and get the impression of the pleasantest and best-ordered city in the country. It's all pleasantly prosperous. Of course, this is a very partial view and you get quite a different impression if you arrive from the South East (still not actually grotty, but definitely not prosperous).
The city centre used to be a little grim, but has regenerated itself better than pretty much anywhere else in the country and is now very pleasant indeed, albeit a little lacking in retail opportunities for a city of its size.
Industrial big city wise I much prefer Glasgow. Sheffield feels disjointed, especially in the centre.
Glasgow has a great big bloody motorway cutting it in half.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
There are apparently 1700 LibDem garden boards across Oxfordshire now, so yes.
June 17-20th, sample of 520 current or recent GB News viewers
Yes, but with the caveat of it being a poll of a subset of the population. So, similar to polls of Muslim voters, or private renters, etc, that have also been done
The significance that you attach to it depends strongly on your prior assumptions about what you think the voting intention of GB News viewers should be
It strikes me as a bit strange that one. Who seeks out 520 GBNews viewers and polls them exclusively? Isn't it more likely to be a sort of supsample of a bigger poll, where they did a question on 'what media sources have you seen recently' and GBNews was vaguely 'ticked' by a load because it was prompted?
Labour 55%, Conservative 22%, LD 10%, Reform 8%, Greens 5%.
Since 2019, that's Labour +6, Conservative -10, LD -5, Reform +6.5, Green +2
A swing of 8% from Conservative to Labour and 2.5% from Conservative to Liberal Democrat so not the big moves we've seen in other parts of the country. We did see from the Holborn & St Pancras poll yesterday some Green strength and Labour weakness in Inner London and I expect we're seeing stronger Labour scores in Outer London.
Just to remind you, I have the following London bets:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
Apart from Croydon East, which has gone - I'm concerned about Harrow East but I'm happy with the other five and while we can see the Conservatives being reduced from the 21 sats they won last time down to single figures, I don't see a wipeout on these numbers.
This poll is the perfect illustration of what's going on at this election. The reason the Tories are down so much overall is because of a swing to Ref, but because Farage's party is much less popular in London, the Tories are correspondingly doing much better. On the other hand, Lab +6 is pretty much the same as the rest of the country.
My own view that Harrow East will be a Conservative hold, due to its ethnic make up.
Certainly possible. The Tory vote may also hold up surprisingly well in Harrow West and Brent West.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
A shrinking pie means violent conflict over resources.
Why - when so few already have so much of the pie? The idea that those people distributed globally who live like gods can't afford to merely live like kings without mass violence is absurd.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Guildford has over 150 orange diamonds up, but are being beaten by Ash and Godalming who have over 300 up. Having a bit of a competition.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Last time I was at CDG I remember coming down an escalator into a holding area that was far too small, and since the escalator was crowded with passengers it almost caused a dangerous crush at the bottom. Very poor design. They may have improved it since then.
Nope
My "favourite" story of that type there (of which I have a few in CDG) is that they started letting people off the plane but forget to open the door at the top of the escalator so you ended up with 50 people at the top screaming to people below don't get on the escalator as you can't get off.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
Obviously France is a third world country.
They have oil too and weapons of mass destruction that could hit us within 45 minute too, we should invade.
Annoyingly, for the French that is, the three places in France where oil is found are:
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Perhaps. But it remains the case that he was the voice for an effectively disenfranchised 4m people. Without him their concerns would have continued to be ignored.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
It doesn't take much scraping the green away to reveal the nasty anti-growth agenda beneath. Carbon capture needn't even be about 'storage technology' - it can be done by dressing UK fields with basalt, to the tune of 45% of Britain's overall net zero target, and the level of carbon uptake can be verified easily by testing of soils. Terrifying for the likes of 148grss because it doesn't involve the forced decimation of the economy, which is their actual goal.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
I'm in Honiton and Sidmouth. I've seen one Tory board and one poster. I've lost count of the LibDem ones. The LibDems are also flooding the constituency. We were canvassed by a member from North Devon yesterday. The Tories have been bizarrely invisible. They are either fighting a very clever, very targeted, below the radar campaign, or they have basically given up.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
As someone (can't remember who) said, carbon emissions are a problem of industrial waste management and should be treated as such. Greenhouse gases are byproducts of combustion. They just happen to be dumped in the air rather than the water or earth.
If the cost of dumping those byproducts is borne by the emitter either through levies or regulation, then technology and the profit motive can do the rest just as it has done with other waste products. It's a case of cleaning up after your own mess.
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
It's sad to see what has historically been one of the great political parties reduced to this.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
If the Greens ended up with zero seats I don't think it would be that surprising - loss of the Lucas personal vote in Brighton, plus the problems with the council, falling just short in Bristol Central being a harsh lesson in the difference between local and national elections, t'other seats demonstrating that Tory voters are a bit more conservative about changing their view then they often seem.
Two seats might be more likely than zero, but I wouldn't rule zero out.
But again, everything I'm hearing from canvas returns in Brighton - where they are specifically talking to typical Green voters and Labour voters - is that we're performing better than usual because those voters in Brighton who typically vote Labour are more willing to vote Green this election. But that could easily be the blinders of partisan campaigning
I'm in Brighton. In Brighton Pavilion (the Green constituency), many Labour voters have voted Green for years, which is why Lucas had such a large majority. But many are returning to Labour, because a) Lucas has gone, b) the Greens made such a mess of running the council, and c) the Greens have put up a non-local candidate against a well-known local Labour candidate. It will be close, but what you're hearing is false.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Frankly, see also: Boris. Everything about his descent was predictable from his ascent. (To be honest, it usually is, character being destiny and whatnot.) The harder question in both cases is... why did the media roll over and indulge in some mutual tummy-tickling?
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
It's sad to see what has historically been one of the great political parties reduced to this.
They havent had any policies for years, what else can they run on ?
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
If the Greens ended up with zero seats I don't think it would be that surprising - loss of the Lucas personal vote in Brighton, plus the problems with the council, falling just short in Bristol Central being a harsh lesson in the difference between local and national elections, t'other seats demonstrating that Tory voters are a bit more conservative about changing their view then they often seem.
Two seats might be more likely than zero, but I wouldn't rule zero out.
But again, everything I'm hearing from canvas returns in Brighton - where they are specifically talking to typical Green voters and Labour voters - is that we're performing better than usual because those voters in Brighton who typically vote Labour are more willing to vote Green this election. But that could easily be the blinders of partisan campaigning
Lucas first won the seat in 2010, so Green campaigners don't really have experience of campaigning in the seat when there is a Labour wave taking them into government. So it's all a bit of uncharted territory, but I am encouraged by that news about canvas returns.
I just got a fake phishing email with a Keir Starmer (not) joke at the end of it from CCHQ. Looks like it was written by a 12-year old, and, even if I agree with it's central premise that he's being deceitful on tax, it's still a cringeworthy begging letter.
Please. Make it stop.
Can some party activists not launch a coup at CCHQ? March in, round the idiots up and expel them from the building?
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
No, any reduction in consumption or production is going to be fiddling while the planet burns. Its a bad joke, not a serious suggestion.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Frankly, see also: Boris. Everything about his descent was predictable from his ascent. (To be honest, it usually is, character being destiny and whatnot.) The harder question in both cases is... why did the media roll over and indulge in some mutual tummy-tickling?
I love this Reform post-mortem, in the complete absence of any polls showing that Putin-gate has had a shred of negative polling impact. Would be very amusing if the next VI poll we see confirms cross over and registers a healthy RefUK increase...
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's an interesting question this, because I think our failure to understand humans as 3 dimensional beings means we put people into mutually exclusive groups like bona fide asylum seekers, economic migrants, illegals etc. In reality people will have a mixture of motivations for leaving a country and going elsewhere. Fear of violence might well be combined with hope for a better life for their children.
I'd take as illustrations of this some of the asylum seekers my parents spend time with at the reception centre near their village. One family: Iranian, 2 parents and a young daughter. They left because the husband was imprisoned for a couple of years for blasphemy-related crimes and beaten up a few times by regime thugs, but they are also intensely ambitious for their daughter who by all accounts is a bit of a child prodigy. She will go far, and will have opportunities here that she would never have had in Iran.
They came across in a small boat as that was the only viable option, though nowhere near the cheapest. They first had to get out of Iran without the authorities noticing. Why come to the UK? Because they had relatives here. Could they have fled to Turkey or Azerbaijan or Armenia and just stayed there? Probably, but the new life would be a very different one, quite possibly under canvas.
And rightly or wrongly from our point of view it is not what we offer the world. We do not have asylum laws that demand people claim asylum in their first safe country, thats just a newspaper myth that gets repeated endlessly. If thats what we want we need to change our laws and accept that means we cant be part of ECHR. Or take a longer route and lobby for change in ECHR.
Lets give up with the pretence whatever we decide.
Sadly the international law and convention should be that people claiming refugee status have exactly the same minimal rights wherever they land, to be governed by the UN. That would be the sort of rights they have in Chad and Bangladesh. Sufficient nutrition, primary education, a tent, and a ticket to go home as soon as the UN decides it is safe to do so. Nothing else will stop venue shopping.
Nothing of course would prevent any country voluntary granting anyone more than this if they wish. But it is not obvious that a person who happens to land in the USA, Norway, Switzerland, UK should have more rights than someone who makes it from Sudan to Kenya. or Burma to Bangladesh.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Perhaps. But it remains the case that he was the voice for an effectively disenfranchised 4m people. Without him their concerns would have continued to be ignored.
Boomer home owners are the most enfranchised and listened to voting demographic there is!
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
I haven't even put a garden board up in my own garden. Not after what happened in that garden a little while ago...
Does make me giggle. Cyber nats on my Facebook adverts telling me to go home to England. Erm, do you not understand how awful that looks? How ashamed practically everyone is for the cause when they read that?
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
A shrinking pie means violent conflict over resources.
Why - when so few already have so much of the pie? The idea that those people distributed globally who live like gods can't afford to merely live like kings without mass violence is absurd.
Try telling people to give things up, and see what response you get. People will make sacrifices for family, in some cases for country, but not for complete strangers.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Mid Beds (currently Labour after last years byelection, previously Donkey with a blue rosette terrritory), you wouldn't know there was an election on. Thought I saw a Labour board outside a house the other day but it was an estate agents board with red in it.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
As someone (can't remember who) said, carbon emissions are a problem of industrial waste management and should be treated as such. Greenhouse gases are byproducts of combustion. They just happen to be dumped in the air rather than the water or earth.
If the cost of dumping those byproducts is borne by the emitter either through levies or regulation, then technology and the profit motive can do the rest just as it has done with other waste products. It's a case of cleaning up after your own mess.
Absolutely!
Humanity is really good at developing technologies to repurpose or manage waste.
If we don't know we need to do it, then we don't, but in many ways the world is already much cleaner than it used to be. The smog of the 1950s has gone, because we fixed it.
CO2 wasn't as serious a problem in the 1950s as smog was, so it wasn't tackled. It is being tackled today.
We need to, and are doing, and will implement 100% clean technologies that don't emit CO2. In which case, we can have our economic growth and a better planet too.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
There are apparently 1700 LibDem garden boards across Oxfordshire now, so yes.
Lots of yellow and red garden boards where I am (Didcot and Wantage), zero Tory ones though it's on paper a strong Tory seat.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Perhaps. But it remains the case that he was the voice for an effectively disenfranchised 4m people. Without him their concerns would have continued to be ignored.
Boomer home owners are the most enfranchised and listened to voting demographic there is!
I don't doubt it. But that still left millions of people with no political champion.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
The use of a few judiciously timed referenda on major EU developments, at the same time as we saw them elsewhere, would have ended any possibility of Farage's career. As it is, and simply on account of that, millions of centrists lent him their support because they saw no other way of having a voice.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Mid Beds (currently Labour after last years byelection, previously Donkey with a blue rosette terrritory), you wouldn't know there was an election on. Thought I saw a Labour board outside a house the other day but it was an estate agents board with red in it.
Cheltenham is awash with Lib Dem posters, a few Tory and seen no Labour posters. Also many leaflets, letters etc from the yellow perils. Labour clearly focusing on Gloucester
The last data ended on 21st June and it’s now 3 days later. Scandal.
Anyone know when we can expect one?
All levity aside, if the tories are going to do any narrowing I’d expect two moments for it to happen. One is right now, 10 days out. The other is in the final 48-hours.
Where's the previous evidence for these two periods when the Tories might expect to narrow their shortfall in the polls?
My conflict coordinates are 75% Palestine, 80.56% Ukraine. I don't think that's wrong, but I'm not certain about the value of this test. I tried to answer questions in the abstract, but it was very obvious which questions related to what Israeli/Palestinian/Russian/Ukrainian claims.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
No, any reduction in consumption or production is going to be fiddling while the planet burns. Its a bad joke, not a serious suggestion.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
You are not serious about the planet.
I'm not serious? You seem to be suggesting that developing 100% clean production lines is just around the corner, and we are nowhere near them. That moving our entire infrastructure to energy produced through clean methods can and will happen soon and using 100% clean methods themselves. Part of the problem we face is that to get to a clean tech future we do need to do some extractivism now - and we can't offset that yet. Globally, instead of trying to manage our emissions at the point we realised they were a problem to give us time to deal with the problem, we kept burning more and more fossil fuels. Because the logic of growth growth growth and tech will save us meant that it would be a problem solved in the future so it doesn't matter what we do now. But that hasn't happened and we are barrelling towards catastrophe.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Lab gets a landslide and a decade in power, Con survive and have something to rebuild from, Lib returns to being the third biggest party, Green hang on to their seat and Nige arrives in Westminster on how own and resigns Clacton to peruse a lucrative career in America by Christmas.
Everyone's happy/relieved? Except for the SNP?
Even some SNP. Kate Forbes would be secretly delighted with that as it makes her heir apparent when Swinney likely loses the next Scottish Parliament election on a similar SNP to SLab swing too and has to follow Yousaf and resign
Also, the remaining MPs would be less likely to come from left voting central belt constituencies. However, unless HQ is filleted, the remaining MSPs will be exactly those lefties, who will be top of the regional lists.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's an interesting question this, because I think our failure to understand humans as 3 dimensional beings means we put people into mutually exclusive groups like bona fide asylum seekers, economic migrants, illegals etc. In reality people will have a mixture of motivations for leaving a country and going elsewhere. Fear of violence might well be combined with hope for a better life for their children.
I'd take as illustrations of this some of the asylum seekers my parents spend time with at the reception centre near their village. One family: Iranian, 2 parents and a young daughter. They left because the husband was imprisoned for a couple of years for blasphemy-related crimes and beaten up a few times by regime thugs, but they are also intensely ambitious for their daughter who by all accounts is a bit of a child prodigy. She will go far, and will have opportunities here that she would never have had in Iran.
They came across in a small boat as that was the only viable option, though nowhere near the cheapest. They first had to get out of Iran without the authorities noticing. Why come to the UK? Because they had relatives here. Could they have fled to Turkey or Azerbaijan or Armenia and just stayed there? Probably, but the new life would be a very different one, quite possibly under canvas.
And rightly or wrongly from our point of view it is not what we offer the world. We do not have asylum laws that demand people claim asylum in their first safe country, thats just a newspaper myth that gets repeated endlessly. If thats what we want we need to change our laws and accept that means we cant be part of ECHR. Or take a longer route and lobby for change in ECHR.
Lets give up with the pretence whatever we decide.
Sadly the international law and convention should be that people claiming refugee status have exactly the same minimal rights wherever they land, to be governed by the UN. That would be the sort of rights they have in Chad and Bangladesh. Sufficient nutrition, primary education, a tent, and a ticket to go home as soon as the UN decides it is safe to do so. Nothing else will stop venue shopping.
Nothing of course would prevent any country voluntary granting anyone more than this if they wish. But it is not obvious that a person who happens to land in the USA, Norway, Switzerland, UK should have more rights than someone who makes it from Sudan to Kenya. or Burma to Bangladesh.
I think a UN run quota scheme driven by a mix of proximity, wealth, population density, capacity and culture makes sense. But realistically its not going to happen at the UN level, and would be very difficult to achieve even with a smaller grouping of countries.
So it comes back to our own laws. If we don't like the laws we have written it is surely up to us to change them, not blame asylum seekers for following them.
I guess it means that today’s FocalData poll is quite down on the Tories, then?
Also that 20.5% for Reform…I wonder if Reform might enjoy a surge in the polls for the next couple of days, because their fieldwork will come before Farage’s Putin comments? Some trading opportunities potentially.
When is FocalData coming out? Imagine it shows Reform rising.....
Time will tell if this is one of those which has Corbyn on 0.6% or something stupid in his seat which calls the rest of the model into question
Damn tories survive on those numbers.
I am confident Greens will get more than 1
The current trend of Reform % going up should mean they get more than 1 too
The thing about the Greens is I keep hearing and seeing positive things about the campaigns in Bristol, Waveny and Herefordshire - but I'm also used to these positive noises and nothing ever materialising - and it being very localised and therefore not really noticeable from the national polling.
I'm sure we'll have more than 1 seat - but where we'll gain and how many I'm still not clear on...
If the Greens ended up with zero seats I don't think it would be that surprising - loss of the Lucas personal vote in Brighton, plus the problems with the council, falling just short in Bristol Central being a harsh lesson in the difference between local and national elections, t'other seats demonstrating that Tory voters are a bit more conservative about changing their view then they often seem.
Two seats might be more likely than zero, but I wouldn't rule zero out.
But again, everything I'm hearing from canvas returns in Brighton - where they are specifically talking to typical Green voters and Labour voters - is that we're performing better than usual because those voters in Brighton who typically vote Labour are more willing to vote Green this election. But that could easily be the blinders of partisan campaigning
I'm in Brighton. In Brighton Pavilion (the Green constituency), many Labour voters have voted Green for years, which is why Lucas had such a large majority. But many are returning to Labour, because a) Lucas has gone, b) the Greens made such a mess of running the council, and c) the Greens have put up a non-local candidate against a well-known local Labour candidate. It will be close, but what you're hearing is false.
Here in Lewisham we got the usual one-off dump of leaflets today via the postman. So in total we have
Vicky Foxcroft (Labour). Slick, standardised and professionally produced Labour leaflet. Little tick-box questionnaire about what we'd like Labour to do in the constituency. 8/10 for the leaflet, only 4/10 for actually being visible or active between elections.
Two from Jean Branch (Lib Dem). Why 2 leaflets, Jean? This is Lewisham North, Labour rosette on donkey territory. Spend your time helping Bobby Dean in Carshalton & Wallington. OK, reasonably personal leaflets but message isn't clear. 6/10
Wrong leaflet from Reform (Marian Newton, Lewisham W and W Dulwich. Should be Edward Powell Lewisham North). Slick turquoise one pager with Nigel and Richard. Stop the boats etc. I'll begrudgingly have to give this 8/10 but with a 2 point deduction to 6 for getting the constituency wrong
[Big] John [Owls] Lloyd (Alliance for green socialism). Quaintly homemade vibe. Classic old trot photo, looking miserable. "John considers Starmer to be as bad as the Tories. The same right wing policies at home....failure to condemn Israeli war crimes in Palestine". SKS fans please explain.
Gwenton Dennis (Workers Party of GB). Another one going to the wrong constituency - he's Lewisham West & West Dulwich too. Maybe the royal mail messed it up. Similar content to John Lloyd but much slicker production values. No mention here of the traditionalist themes Galloway used in Rochdale. Rather touching dedication and picture of candidate's late mum and sister on the back. 7/10
No Green (surprising, must be on the way) or Conservative leaflets yet.
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
Is this legal?
It's rubbish, but makes entirely clear that it isn't actually from Starmer but represents their view of what he thinks. So it doesn't raise any legal issues really.
Labour 55%, Conservative 22%, LD 10%, Reform 8%, Greens 5%.
Since 2019, that's Labour +6, Conservative -10, LD -5, Reform +6.5, Green +2
A swing of 8% from Conservative to Labour and 2.5% from Conservative to Liberal Democrat so not the big moves we've seen in other parts of the country. We did see from the Holborn & St Pancras poll yesterday some Green strength and Labour weakness in Inner London and I expect we're seeing stronger Labour scores in Outer London.
Just to remind you, I have the following London bets:
Harrow East – CON 9/4 Ruislip, Northwood & Pinner – CON 4/5 Bromley & Biggin Hill – CON 11/8 Croydon East – CON 10/1 Croydon South – CON 2/1 Sutton & Cheam – LD 11/10 Romford – CON 6/4
Apart from Croydon East, which has gone - I'm concerned about Harrow East but I'm happy with the other five and while we can see the Conservatives being reduced from the 21 sats they won last time down to single figures, I don't see a wipeout on these numbers.
This poll is the perfect illustration of what's going on at this election. The reason the Tories are down so much overall is because of a swing to Ref, but because Farage's party is much less popular in London, the Tories are correspondingly doing much better. On the other hand, Lab +6 is pretty much the same as the rest of the country.
My own view that Harrow East will be a Conservative hold, due to its ethnic make up.
Pretty sure London will be relatively poor for Labour which in terms of GE seats is okay for them this time. It also means they may perform relatively better elsewhere.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Frankly, see also: Boris. Everything about his descent was predictable from his ascent. (To be honest, it usually is, character being destiny and whatnot.) The harder question in both cases is... why did the media roll over and indulge in some mutual tummy-tickling?
I love this Reform post-mortem, in the complete absence of any polls showing that Putin-gate has had a shred of negative polling impact. Would be very amusing if the next VI poll we see confirms cross over and registers a healthy RefUK increase...
Both the telegraph and the daily Mail have come out on the attack against Fromage for this and express is just totally silent. The Sun has been reporting on the outrage too. I can see this going real damage.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
I'm in a Tory/LD marginal, albeit v much at the LD end of the seat - so load of orange diamonds, and a few Lab signs. Not seen a Tory one yet.
Lib Dems generally considerably more visible in terms of canvassing and leaflets but if the rumours about Tories shifting resources to avoid total wipeout are true, they may just simply have ceded the ground war here. I don't expect anything other than a Lib Dem win here.
Next door in Hazel Grove, also a LD/Con marginal, I'm actually less sure - it's quit possible enough Lab supporters may fail to vote tactically that Wild Willy Wragg's successor may ride through the middle. 6/1 available if you're feeling bold! I think it's value, but wouldn't go for it myself.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Britain is not even joining the Single Market until some kind of arrangement on freedom of movement can be made.
Which may be never.
Having said that, clearly immigration is rising up the political agenda across Europe and a near-future EU may be amendable to qualifying freedom of movement somehow.
The biggest problem with Free Movement is that if it ever returns everyone in Britain will flee
Lol
If the U.K. is so shit relative to Europe, why is it that people are paying savage organised crime syndicates the equivalent of the price of a house (in their home country) to get into the U.K. from France? By extremely (and obviously) dangerous routes, no less.
This question has already been answered a zillion times. If you have connections in the UK, speak some English and thus have a chance of earning a living there, you'd obviously want to go there. It has little to do with the objective merits or otherwise of the UK and France. This is quite obvious to anyone who takes a moment to think of the migrants as actual people.
So you're saying its just regular migration desires which should go through regular processes the same as everyone else and nothing to do with asylum then?
It's an interesting question this, because I think our failure to understand humans as 3 dimensional beings means we put people into mutually exclusive groups like bona fide asylum seekers, economic migrants, illegals etc. In reality people will have a mixture of motivations for leaving a country and going elsewhere. Fear of violence might well be combined with hope for a better life for their children.
I'd take as illustrations of this some of the asylum seekers my parents spend time with at the reception centre near their village. One family: Iranian, 2 parents and a young daughter. They left because the husband was imprisoned for a couple of years for blasphemy-related crimes and beaten up a few times by regime thugs, but they are also intensely ambitious for their daughter who by all accounts is a bit of a child prodigy. She will go far, and will have opportunities here that she would never have had in Iran.
They came across in a small boat as that was the only viable option, though nowhere near the cheapest. They first had to get out of Iran without the authorities noticing. Why come to the UK? Because they had relatives here. Could they have fled to Turkey or Azerbaijan or Armenia and just stayed there? Probably, but the new life would be a very different one, quite possibly under canvas.
And rightly or wrongly from our point of view it is not what we offer the world. We do not have asylum laws that demand people claim asylum in their first safe country, thats just a newspaper myth that gets repeated endlessly. If thats what we want we need to change our laws and accept that means we cant be part of ECHR. Or take a longer route and lobby for change in ECHR.
Lets give up with the pretence whatever we decide.
Sadly the international law and convention should be that people claiming refugee status have exactly the same minimal rights wherever they land, to be governed by the UN. That would be the sort of rights they have in Chad and Bangladesh. Sufficient nutrition, primary education, a tent, and a ticket to go home as soon as the UN decides it is safe to do so. Nothing else will stop venue shopping.
Nothing of course would prevent any country voluntary granting anyone more than this if they wish. But it is not obvious that a person who happens to land in the USA, Norway, Switzerland, UK should have more rights than someone who makes it from Sudan to Kenya. or Burma to Bangladesh.
You are starting from the presumption that the current situation is problematic, therefore we need to change the rules. I don't think that's the case. The reasons people need to seek asylum (e.g. civil war and oppression in Syria) are the problem and we should do something about those, but the total number of asylum seekers is small compared to other sources of immigration and can be managed better through international agreements and action. I can see that countries on the "frontline", like Italy, Turkey (4M refugees), Jordan and Iran (800k+ refugees) might want to take a different approach, but this is not a problem with the application of international law in the UK.
June 17-20th, sample of 520 current or recent GB News viewers
Yes, but with the caveat of it being a poll of a subset of the population. So, similar to polls of Muslim voters, or private renters, etc, that have also been done
The significance that you attach to it depends strongly on your prior assumptions about what you think the voting intention of GB News viewers should be
It strikes me as a bit strange that one. Who seeks out 520 GBNews viewers and polls them exclusively? Isn't it more likely to be a sort of supsample of a bigger poll, where they did a question on 'what media sources have you seen recently' and GBNews was vaguely 'ticked' by a load because it was prompted?
They sought them out because GB News paid them to seek them out. I would assume that most online panels will ask their new members lots of questions about all sorts of things - housing tenure, media consumption, past vote in the AV referendum - so that they can weight the sample using objective population measures.
So if they are asked to poll GB News viewers they can simply email their panel members who have previously told them that GB News is one of the channels they sometimes watch.
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
It doesn't take much scraping the green away to reveal the nasty anti-growth agenda beneath. Carbon capture needn't even be about 'storage technology' - it can be done by dressing UK fields with basalt, to the tune of 45% of Britain's overall net zero target, and the level of carbon uptake can be verified easily by testing of soils. Terrifying for the likes of 148grss because it doesn't involve the forced decimation of the economy, which is their actual goal.
It also remineralises the soil and makes it far more fertile.
I used SEER rockdust on my allotment and it was very effective.
Funny thing is they smear me as a climate denier but I grow my own veg travel mostly by public transport and drive very little (had the car since new the thick end of two decades ago and will keep it till it packs up (the greenest way possible of driving due to the carbon cost of construction and disposal).
If they actually believed what they say then the COP and WEF summits would be held by videoconference.
What they really mean is that they want a subsistence existence stuck in 15 minute cities for most so that there is unspoiled Lebensraum for them and they can air condition their mansions and fly their private jets without the earth running out of resources any time soon. Oil isn't infinite. Lets not let the plebs waste it, what?
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Perhaps. But it remains the case that he was the voice for an effectively disenfranchised 4m people. Without him their concerns would have continued to be ignored.
Boomer home owners are the most enfranchised and listened to voting demographic there is!
I don't doubt it. But that still left millions of people with no political champion.
I mean, I'd personally argue that many more are disenfranchised by the neoliberal consensus and the current Overton window we have. Many people look at the Brexit vote as some strongly held ideological desire by voters to have the UK be independent from the EU when, at the end of the day, it was mostly because many voters had been told (and believed) that if money wasn't being sent to Europe it would be spent here and they'd see their lives improve. That didn't happen and, indeed, the opposite did.
So many people who previously cared so much about leaving do not care anymore - because the outcome they were promised was not delivered. Some of them will go rightwards, I'm sure, believing they were stabbed in the back, but more so will continue to believe what they did before - that no one in politics cares about them and can't help them so what's the point.
I think Corbyn's popularity (and he was popular for a time, getting a higher vote share than it looks like Labour will get this GE) was because he directly said he did care and was going to do something about it. I still think that Johnson won more due to levelling up than Brexit - a promise to start spending again in a politics where that wasn't happening. As soon as Corbyn was no longer a threat and levelling up didn't materialise, both parties went back to "fiscal rules" and "tightening our belts" and more trickle down solutions, and because the Tories are in power they felt the backlash of the fact that doesn't work and the public are feeling that viscerally. Those voters will abandon Labour too if / when they do the same thing.
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
No, any reduction in consumption or production is going to be fiddling while the planet burns. Its a bad joke, not a serious suggestion.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
You are not serious about the planet.
I'm not serious? You seem to be suggesting that developing 100% clean production lines is just around the corner, and we are nowhere near them. That moving our entire infrastructure to energy produced through clean methods can and will happen soon and using 100% clean methods themselves. Part of the problem we face is that to get to a clean tech future we do need to do some extractivism now - and we can't offset that yet. Globally, instead of trying to manage our emissions at the point we realised they were a problem to give us time to deal with the problem, we kept burning more and more fossil fuels. Because the logic of growth growth growth and tech will save us meant that it would be a problem solved in the future so it doesn't matter what we do now. But that hasn't happened and we are barrelling towards catastrophe.
When do you expect this catastrophe to arrive and what will it look like.
I'm in Harrogate and Knaresborough. A few Lib Dem boards and the odd Conservative one in fields. Lots of leaflets, Lib Dems beating Tories but not by much. No canvassing by anyone. At the local by election we couldn't move for Lib Dem councillors. We are in a Lib Dem Council seat so I'm surprised at lack of canvassing. Guess they are going to wards without councillors.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Mid Beds (currently Labour after last years byelection, previously Donkey with a blue rosette terrritory), you wouldn't know there was an election on. Thought I saw a Labour board outside a house the other day but it was an estate agents board with red in it.
Cheltenham is awash with Lib Dem posters, a few Tory and seen no Labour posters. Also many leaflets, letters etc from the yellow perils. Labour clearly focusing on Gloucester
Thanks Mac. Can you please keep posting your reports.
There's an abundance of LD diamonds in Winchcombe, and even more in Bishop Cleeve, which is their stronghold in Tewkesbury constituency. Seen one Labour poster in our High Street, and that's it. Have now had leaflets from every candidate except the Labour lady. Apparently she skipped a radio hustings programme last week. Unfortunately the bookies seem to have cottoned on now to her being a bit of a no-show and the bet which I so proudly trumpeted on here is no longer such good value, but at least I can feel that I have not led the brethren here astray.
Best guess is that Laurence Robertson holds on by a couple of thousand so his odds of 4/9 are probably about right.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Perhaps. But it remains the case that he was the voice for an effectively disenfranchised 4m people. Without him their concerns would have continued to be ignored.
Boomer home owners are the most enfranchised and listened to voting demographic there is!
I don't doubt it. But that still left millions of people with no political champion.
I mean, I'd personally argue that many more are disenfranchised by the neoliberal consensus and the current Overton window we have. Many people look at the Brexit vote as some strongly held ideological desire by voters to have the UK be independent from the EU when, at the end of the day, it was mostly because many voters had been told (and believed) that if money wasn't being sent to Europe it would be spent here and they'd see their lives improve. That didn't happen and, indeed, the opposite did.
So many people who previously cared so much about leaving do not care anymore - because the outcome they were promised was not delivered. Some of them will go rightwards, I'm sure, believing they were stabbed in the back, but more so will continue to believe what they did before - that no one in politics cares about them and can't help them so what's the point.
I think Corbyn's popularity (and he was popular for a time, getting a higher vote share than it looks like Labour will get this GE) was because he directly said he did care and was going to do something about it. I still think that Johnson won more due to levelling up than Brexit - a promise to start spending again in a politics where that wasn't happening. As soon as Corbyn was no longer a threat and levelling up didn't materialise, both parties went back to "fiscal rules" and "tightening our belts" and more trickle down solutions, and because the Tories are in power they felt the backlash of the fact that doesn't work and the public are feeling that viscerally. Those voters will abandon Labour too if / when they do the same thing.
Couple of things. First off, it's not for you or me to place a value on peoples' motives for voting. That's up to them. We live in a parliamentary democracy and those 4m people exercised their democratic right and strength to effect change. Well done them. And well done Nigel Farage for representing them.
As to levelling up, I agree. It was and should have been Boris's great achievement. Instead, however, he had to deal with a black swan global pandemic wherein the government paid for people to stay at home, and then go out, and then stay at home again and this cost many, many of the levelling up billions. Who knows what would have happened absent Covid but it is being a tad harsh (although reflects the political reality) for not spending money on levelling up when he was paying you to stay indoors.
Farage doesn't like it up him, does he? Imagine if he'd received the same scrutiny as other politicians over the last decade. What a different country this would be, But instead, the vast majority of the media gave him a free ride.
Frankly, see also: Boris. Everything about his descent was predictable from his ascent. (To be honest, it usually is, character being destiny and whatnot.) The harder question in both cases is... why did the media roll over and indulge in some mutual tummy-tickling?
I love this Reform post-mortem, in the complete absence of any polls showing that Putin-gate has had a shred of negative polling impact. Would be very amusing if the next VI poll we see confirms cross over and registers a healthy RefUK increase...
Both the telegraph and the daily Mail have come out on the attack against Fromage for this and express is just totally silent. The Sun has been reporting on the outrage too. I can see this going real damage.
The Mail has gone strangely silent after coming out very punchy - to what extent do these papers *actually* guide what their readers think, as opposed to being read because they (usually) reflect what their readers think? Have a look at the DM comments (especially the most popular comments) on every Farage attack piece.
I live in a Tory/Labour marginal, expected to go Labour by 5 figures. They are well organised, have canvassed heavily for 6 weeks and have garden boards all over the place, really affluent areas as well as the others. Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
Peter Hitchens: "Yes, it was a lawless putsch. My inch-by-inch and line-by-line examination of the illegal overthrow of Ukraine's legitimate President in 2014 (swiftly condoned, to their lasting shame, by the Western democracies)". [Plus link to an article he wrote on the subject in April 23
Peter Hitchens confirms once again he's as thick as pigshit, thanks for the reminder.
Climate change denier too. Moron status confirmed.
Another issue where the three main parties and their fellow travellers have the same view, view anyone who dissents as a cretin and then wonder why people like Meloni, Le Pen and Farage start getting lots of votes and decide it is because they are thick and bigoted, in much the same way a Georgian Aristocrat regarded the peasants.
Anthropogenic climate change is happening - that is a fact. The main issue is how to tackle the issue. The neoliberals want to allow big business to thrive whilst also paying lip service to the idea of being environmentally friendly, so they move taxes onto consumers rather than producers of CO2 - the petrol hikes that many rural Europeans so despise because it makes rural living more expensive is a good example of this. The right / far right want to pretend climate change isn't happening and move on to a scarcity model of politics - there isn't enough left for the Volk, so we must kick out the foreigner (and the dissenters who aren't really people like us anyway). The left propose the only viable alternative - investment in renewable energy and a reduced reliance on fossil fuels. This will mean huge phase shifts (reduced plastic use, reduced usage of hydrocarbon based fertilisers, etc), but at least the left are willing to say what the problem is (excess production and consumption for the benefit of capital) and where to get the resources to tackle the issue (those who already hoard capital) without having to scapegoat immigrants.
There is another option and that's to value sustainability and ecological impact beside profit as a business motive. It's no good making money if you're destroying the world. Supporting businesses which are ecologically sustainable and seek to mitigate the impact of climate change would be sensible options for a more business-oriented Government and if that means companies who refuse to be sustainable go to the wall so be it.
There is a fine line but Govenrment can also be about influencing public behaviour and educating people as to what is happening, why it is happening and the consequences especially for those parts of the world where the impacts are more keenly and immediately felt.
We too face issues from rising sea levels and a climate with more frequent extremes of weather and that means sensible thinking on houses including not building housing developments on flood plains.
The problem with capitalistic growth is that it is ideologically wedded not only to profit, but ever growing profit, which demand ever more extraction and squeezing of labour, along with increasingly trying to foist externalities onto public coffers (or ignoring them completely) makes it really difficult. Already we have right wingers and big businesses saying there is too much green tape and regulation etc. We also know that consumption and CO2 production is skewwed heavily towards the extremely wealthy - both globally and within individual nations. The answer, more equitable distribution of resources and an overall decrease in consumption reliant on fossil fuels, doesn't really square with the continuation of the profit motive as it currently exists.
You don't believe in net zero, do you?
If we have net zero, why do we need "equitable distribution of resources" for climate reasons, considering we can scale up or down consumption/production and anything times zero equals zero.
If we don't have net zero, how do we stop climate change?
If you were serious about tackling climate change, you wouldn't believe any of the garbage you're spouting.
I mean, I don't think globally we're going to get to net zero because many of the people saying we will are hoping carbon capture works better than it currently does - atm efficiency is too low to depend on it. So to get to net zero it will not just be countries sequestering any carbon output to equal zero (as the tech to sequester is currently not good enough), it will require a reduction in emissions. Reduction in emissions will require a reduction in production and consumption. If the logic of growth for the average worker is "you get a smaller slice, but we'll grow the pie", the logic of static growth or even degrowth for the average worker should be "you get a bigger slice, but we're slowly shrinking the pie". That will have to come via wealth redistribution - those who have a huge amount will have to give up their hoarded resources for the benefits of those who have less or none.
So you don't give a fuck about the planet and want to trash the environment and keep emitting pollution then.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
What? No - I don't want to keep emitting pollution, the exact opposite. And I do want to invest in clean technology - but we can't keep doing what we're doing and just swap out fossil fuels for renewables; we'd still have massive problems. We have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption - deforestation for farming, the issues of topsoil erosion, as well as other pollutants such as those in water. This isn't as simple as slowly transition away from oil and gas to solar, wind and waves - we will have to actively change how energy and resources are produced and distributed, both for efficiency as well as a moral imperative to not just leave the poor to suffer the negative impacts of the changes to the climate we've already caused.
No we don't have to tackle overproduction and overconsumption, we need clean technologies.
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
I'm not saying we should keep emissions, I'm saying we are never going to have a 100% clean production method. The carbon capture we have at the moment, at it's best, captures around 40% of CO2. The only way to get to reduce the amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere to a point where we can give ourselves the time to manage the consequences of what we have already done is by reducing production and consumption. and the only way to do that is to understand that the states and individuals that overconsume and hoard wealth can no longer to afford to do that.
No, any reduction in consumption or production is going to be fiddling while the planet burns. Its a bad joke, not a serious suggestion.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
You are not serious about the planet.
I'm not serious? You seem to be suggesting that developing 100% clean production lines is just around the corner, and we are nowhere near them. That moving our entire infrastructure to energy produced through clean methods can and will happen soon and using 100% clean methods themselves. Part of the problem we face is that to get to a clean tech future we do need to do some extractivism now - and we can't offset that yet. Globally, instead of trying to manage our emissions at the point we realised they were a problem to give us time to deal with the problem, we kept burning more and more fossil fuels. Because the logic of growth growth growth and tech will save us meant that it would be a problem solved in the future so it doesn't matter what we do now. But that hasn't happened and we are barrelling towards catastrophe.
When do you expect this catastrophe to arrive and what will it look like.
I mean, much of it is already arriving - with the lesser effects of rising global temperatures being more volatile weather, more extreme weather, places suffering from great droughts and then flooding. People are already concerned about the AMOC and the Gulf Stream. Farmers are already raising concerns about crop production. We are already experiencing things that some scientists thought would be decades away. And that's at almost 1.5 above the pre Industrial base line.
Every step closer to 2 degrees above the pre Industrial base line puts us at risk of irreversible tipping points - polar ice sheets melting, loss of permafrost, Amazon loss, monsoon season shifts. Any of these irreversible tipping points will send global shockwaves as we see mass displacement beyond anything already seen, land either uninhabitable or no longer usable for production (whether that is farming or otherwise).
Comments
Gentlemen of the North being one
Heathrow is far superior
Of course, it helps that I was coming from the west. So you arrive in the city through a succession of very pleasant stone built suburbs. More than any other city, Sheffield is sectorised, with the best areas in the west and south west. But it means you can, if you want, walk from the Peak District to the city centre in about an hour and get the impression of the pleasantest and best-ordered city in the country. It's all pleasantly prosperous.
Of course, this is a very partial view and you get quite a different impression if you arrive from the South East (still not actually grotty, but definitely not prosperous).
The city centre used to be a little grim, but has regenerated itself better than pretty much anywhere else in the country and is now very pleasant indeed, albeit a little lacking in retail opportunities for a city of its size.
In unrelated news, there was an increase in Covid cases in York shortly thereafter.
Lets give up with the pretence whatever we decide.
Pissing about with marginal reductions in "the size of the pie" will do bugger all to reduce emissions, since we'll still have billions of people making emissions globally and the rest of the world has no desire to shrink their size of the pie - quite rightly too.
Only investing in clean technology gets us to net zero and that requires no change in pie size. And clean technologies can be adopted by the rest of the planet too.
Does anyone on this site live in a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, have the yellows been putting up posters and garden boards?
https://www.idrlabs.com/conflict-coordinates/test.php
With clean technologies we could double everyone's production and consumption and there'd still be no emissions as anything times zero equals zero.
There is no reason to reduce production or consumption, only emissions. Clean science and technology means we can and should be able to increase production cleanly to improve living standards while protecting the environment.
Pissing about reducing production while keeping emissions does nothing for the environment.
My "favourite" story of that type there (of which I have a few in CDG) is that they started letting people off the plane but forget to open the door at the top of the escalator so you ended up with 50 people at the top screaming to people below don't get on the escalator as you can't get off.
Tories are a ‘shower of shit’, says Conservative candidate James Cracknell
Honestly this strategy is probably far better for Tory candidates than toeing the party line…
The Cote d'Azur
The Paris Basin
Around Bordeaux
@JAHeale
Latest CCHQ email sent in the name of Keir Starmer:
“Ignore this email and let me do to the country what you know I want to do.”
https://x.com/JAHeale/status/1805242649714020391
@DPJHodges
Why don't they just send out an e-mail saying "We're losing so badly we have lost our minds. This campaign has driven us completely mad. Help" and be done with it.
If the cost of dumping those byproducts is borne by the emitter either through levies or regulation, then technology and the profit motive can do the rest just as it has done with other waste products. It's a case of cleaning up after your own mess.
We don't need massive carbon capture and we don't need to reduce consumption or production, we need 100% clean production methods. Which we are working on and investing in.
Develop 100% clean production techniques and we can have as much production and consumption as we like - and so can the rest of the planet.
And while you may dream of cutting other people's size of their pie, the rest of the planet will not voluntarily cut their own size of the pie. Quite the opposite, the rest of the planet is singularly focused on growing their pie.
What the rest of the world will do is adopt 100% clean production techniques that we develop and adopt too.
Indeed 100% clean technologies can help grow the pie. Extracting oil and gas is expensive, if we can tap freely available, renewable, natural resources like wind and sunshine to get our power instead of importing expensive consumable commodities, then we can invest to grow while helping the planet.
You are not serious about the planet.
Warwicks are 230/8 at Edgbaston vs Hants, who scored 298 yesterday.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3f_7o4KnE
Nothing of course would prevent any country voluntary granting anyone more than this if they wish. But it is not obvious that a person who happens to land in the USA, Norway, Switzerland, UK should have more rights than someone who makes it from Sudan to Kenya. or Burma to Bangladesh.
Does make me giggle. Cyber nats on my Facebook adverts telling me to go home to England. Erm, do you not understand how awful that looks? How ashamed practically everyone is for the cause when they read that?
Humanity is really good at developing technologies to repurpose or manage waste.
If we don't know we need to do it, then we don't, but in many ways the world is already much cleaner than it used to be. The smog of the 1950s has gone, because we fixed it.
CO2 wasn't as serious a problem in the 1950s as smog was, so it wasn't tackled. It is being tackled today.
We need to, and are doing, and will implement 100% clean technologies that don't emit CO2. In which case, we can have our economic growth and a better planet too.
It was removed from wiki and with good reason
So it comes back to our own laws. If we don't like the laws we have written it is surely up to us to change them, not blame asylum seekers for following them.
Vicky Foxcroft (Labour). Slick, standardised and professionally produced Labour leaflet. Little tick-box questionnaire about what we'd like Labour to do in the constituency. 8/10 for the leaflet, only 4/10 for actually being visible or active between elections.
Two from Jean Branch (Lib Dem). Why 2 leaflets, Jean? This is Lewisham North, Labour rosette on donkey territory. Spend your time helping Bobby Dean in Carshalton & Wallington. OK, reasonably personal leaflets but message isn't clear. 6/10
Wrong leaflet from Reform (Marian Newton, Lewisham W and W Dulwich. Should be Edward Powell Lewisham North). Slick turquoise one pager with Nigel and Richard. Stop the boats etc. I'll begrudgingly have to give this 8/10 but with a 2 point deduction to 6 for getting the constituency wrong
[Big] John [Owls] Lloyd (Alliance for green socialism). Quaintly homemade vibe. Classic old trot photo, looking miserable. "John considers Starmer to be as bad as the Tories. The same right wing policies at home....failure to condemn Israeli war crimes in Palestine". SKS fans please explain.
Gwenton Dennis (Workers Party of GB). Another one going to the wrong constituency - he's Lewisham West & West Dulwich too. Maybe the royal mail messed it up. Similar content to John Lloyd but much slicker production values. No mention here of the traditionalist themes Galloway used in Rochdale. Rather touching dedication and picture of candidate's late mum and sister on the back. 7/10
No Green (surprising, must be on the way) or Conservative leaflets yet.
Lib Dems generally considerably more visible in terms of canvassing and leaflets but if the rumours about Tories shifting resources to avoid total wipeout are true, they may just simply have ceded the ground war here. I don't expect anything other than a Lib Dem win here.
Next door in Hazel Grove, also a LD/Con marginal, I'm actually less sure - it's quit possible enough Lab supporters may fail to vote tactically that Wild Willy Wragg's successor may ride through the middle. 6/1 available if you're feeling bold! I think it's value, but wouldn't go for it myself.
NEW THREAD
So if they are asked to poll GB News viewers they can simply email their panel members who have previously told them that GB News is one of the channels they sometimes watch.
Will we see the like in this campaign, or was the 11% People Polling Faragasm the one?
No other explanation surely?
I used SEER rockdust on my allotment and it was very effective.
Funny thing is they smear me as a climate denier but I grow my own veg travel mostly by public transport and drive very little (had the car since new the thick end of two decades ago and will keep it till it packs up (the greenest way possible of driving due to the carbon cost of construction and disposal).
If they actually believed what they say then the COP and WEF summits would be held by videoconference.
What they really mean is that they want a subsistence existence stuck in 15 minute cities for most so that there is unspoiled Lebensraum for them and they can air condition their mansions and fly their private jets without the earth running out of resources any time soon. Oil isn't infinite. Lets not let the plebs waste it, what?
So many people who previously cared so much about leaving do not care anymore - because the outcome they were promised was not delivered. Some of them will go rightwards, I'm sure, believing they were stabbed in the back, but more so will continue to believe what they did before - that no one in politics cares about them and can't help them so what's the point.
I think Corbyn's popularity (and he was popular for a time, getting a higher vote share than it looks like Labour will get this GE) was because he directly said he did care and was going to do something about it. I still think that Johnson won more due to levelling up than Brexit - a promise to start spending again in a politics where that wasn't happening. As soon as Corbyn was no longer a threat and levelling up didn't materialise, both parties went back to "fiscal rules" and "tightening our belts" and more trickle down solutions, and because the Tories are in power they felt the backlash of the fact that doesn't work and the public are feeling that viscerally. Those voters will abandon Labour too if / when they do the same thing.
There's an abundance of LD diamonds in Winchcombe, and even more in Bishop Cleeve, which is their stronghold in Tewkesbury constituency. Seen one Labour poster in our High Street, and that's it. Have now had leaflets from every candidate except the Labour lady. Apparently she skipped a radio hustings programme last week. Unfortunately the bookies seem to have cottoned on now to her being a bit of a no-show and the bet which I so proudly trumpeted on here is no longer such good value, but at least I can feel that I have not led the brethren here astray.
Best guess is that Laurence Robertson holds on by a couple of thousand so his odds of 4/9 are probably about right.
As to levelling up, I agree. It was and should have been Boris's great achievement. Instead, however, he had to deal with a black swan global pandemic wherein the government paid for people to stay at home, and then go out, and then stay at home again and this cost many, many of the levelling up billions. Who knows what would have happened absent Covid but it is being a tad harsh (although reflects the political reality) for not spending money on levelling up when he was paying you to stay indoors.
Every step closer to 2 degrees above the pre Industrial base line puts us at risk of irreversible tipping points - polar ice sheets melting, loss of permafrost, Amazon loss, monsoon season shifts. Any of these irreversible tipping points will send global shockwaves as we see mass displacement beyond anything already seen, land either uninhabitable or no longer usable for production (whether that is farming or otherwise).