Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
There should be little doubt that Ukip 2015 absorbed the BNP 2010 vote. Many of their very largest swings were in areas which had previously had BNP votes in the 3-6k range. But I wouldn't overegg the good-un argument or assume that it was unintentional - in the 2015 debates, he asserted that African immigrants were spreading AIDS throughout Britain. The recent campaign has further clarified that he wants to keep the racists onside at arm's length. He says he doesn't want to associate with them. But he doesn't kick them out either.
Agreed and I'm not really meaning to excuse Reform's tolerance of racism within its ranks. Nevertheless I think the UK as a whole benefits from the detoxifying of debate that the destruction of the BNP heralded.
Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
If Farage has done a good job in suppressing the BNP, the job of the next Tory leader will be to suppress Reform. No way back without doing that first.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I’m surprised Pannick has this view . The child can go to a state school . The Labour policy isn’t stopping the child’s education.
Dan Neidle has pointed out that it all depends on what instructions he has given.
FWIW the bigger concern private schools should have is around the tax point. Currently schools are taking in millions in fees in advance hoping to dodge VAT (one client took in almost a million a day in the week after the GE). Many schools are screwing this up & making their FIA obvious tax dodges that won't work. Even the ones that aren't may be in trouble though - for Neidle's view is that the tax point is the start of the year and that parents are buying x years of education, rather than 1 education. As such the tax point would fall at the start of the school year the year of education starts in - if the courts take a similar view then schools will still have to pay VAT on the fees, which means they're effectively selling the education for 90% (schools on average will reclaim half the VAT they have to charge in fees) of normal price (even before the FIA discount).
Yes, I've read about this. It seems to go as follows:
1. Labour's plan to charge VAT on school fees will be unaffordable for many ordinary families like us who scrimp and save to afford the fees.
2. Therefore, to avoid the VAT charge we've managed to find enough money to pay 5-10 years' fees in advance.
Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
If Farage has done a good job in suppressing the BNP, the job of the next Tory leader will be to suppress Reform. No way back without doing that first.
Or embrace Reform and accept being a minority party for the forseeable future.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
Harris as she would remain VP as well as taking office as President until a replacement is chosen
I don't think that's right. I believe the responsibilities of VP (of which there are few but officiating over electoral vote count is one) would pass to Mike Johnson as Speaker.
However, I doubt they'd refuse to confirm any reasonable choice. The House GOP is increasingly extreme but there are enough who'd either confirm or abstain.
No they wouldn't, the VP would remain as elected by the Congress in 2020, the Constitution only says the Speaker fills the role of President if both the President and VP are dead or incapacitated. If the VP is still alive and kicking they retain the role, the Speaker doesn't fill it
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
If Farage has done a good job in suppressing the BNP, the job of the next Tory leader will be to suppress Reform. No way back without doing that first.
Or embrace Reform and accept being a minority party for the forseeable future.
It took the Canadian Tories 10 years to embrace Reform after being overtaken by them in their 1993 landslide defeat. Yet after they merged and formed a new Conservative party in 2003 that party had defeated the incumbent Liberals and taken power by 2006 after the Federal election that year
MiC with a new one 🚨New @Moreincommon_ voting intention finds a tie for third place and a Lib Dem campaign high. Labour lead by 15. 🔵CON 24 (+1) 🔴LAB 39 (-1) 🟠LIB DEM 13 (+2) 🟣REF UK 13 (-1) 🟢GRN 5 (-) 🟡SNP 3 (-) Dates: 26-28/6 N: 3,361 Tables: moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/votin…
That's close to what I am expecting - a few more off Reform and a couple more to the Tories by polling day.
Reform have an ugly stench around them now on racism, Putinism and Farage strops.
I can't see too many sensible British people going for them on the day, in reality.
My ex wife is weirdly keen on Reform. 27 years old. Ex Corbyn voter
A plague on both your houses?
Corbo. It was funny when he went to that dinner with the football chaps during Covid.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
What has that got to do with a “Professional” (sic) association suppressing evidence and ignoring financial conflicts of interest in their advice on children?
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
The Telegraph have the latest from their "Secret candidate":
It’s now been five weeks since Rishi called the election and I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I will lose my seat.
It is particularly depressing given that this could have been avoided. If the polls had narrowed to 10 points or below I could have won the seat against the odds. That’s the sense I keep getting on the doorstep – that it would have been possible. Yet we’re still 20 points behind.
There’s only so far that personal popularity in a constituency can get you with the shortcomings of the national campaign and the shortcomings of the Prime Minister that we’ve got.
Now I’m grappling with the depressing fact that, having put everything into this constituency and worked incredibly hard, it’s all going to have been in vain – because of factors beyond my control.
It is painful to keep motivating myself to get out and campaign when, realistically, I’m probably just looking at different degrees of defeat. The sole thing motivating me is the desire to secure a respectable loss. That’s very much not how I thought things would be when I was looking ahead to the election a few months ago.
For many of us, there is a deep, underlying anger at Rishi’s handling of the campaign and his extraordinary decision to call the election now. Speaking to several candidates the other day about how the campaign was going, there was a mixture between all of us of white hot anger and just sheer despondency.
The reason that the odds were quite good on the prospect of an early election – on which some of my senior colleagues were foolishly betting – is because most people who knew anything about politics thought it would be a bad decision. That has been proven to be the case.
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
They look like them.
Only if you never had the 'pleasure' of experiencing the NF first hand.
While I was delivering leaflets in my constituency this week, a man approaching retirement came up to me to say: “I want to tell you something. I voted for you last time. Not this time. I’m voting Reform.”
We ended up having a debate and by the end, it seemed probable that he would ultimately vote for me. But he wanted to show me how annoyed he was with the Conservatives nationally – particularly that we haven’t done enough to bring down levels of immigration. It’s difficult to blame him and there are many more like him. It’s an impossible task for us to win them all round before polling day.
Yesterday, when I asked another constituent whether they were voting for me, he replied: “Just about.” He said his “report card” that he wants me to communicate to Rishi Sunak is: “Must do better”.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of this election, though, is that we can no longer be confident that party members will vote Conservative. In several cases, what I thought would be a brief conversation asking a member to put a poster up has ended up being a 10-15-minute conversation trying to persuade them to vote for me.
One of the lower profile scandals that has really damaged us among the grassroots is the parachuting of favoured people like Richard Holden, the party chairman, into what No 10 would have considered safe seats. In fact, his behaviour has demotivated activists and also essentially stripped the party of a chairman during a general election campaign.
The party chairman should be the key attack dog during a campaign like this, on the airwaves all the time. But, since an initial car-crash interview on Sky after he was installed as candidate for Basildon and Billericay, he’s hardly been seen.
Now I’ve heard that senior figures on the Left of the party are floating the idea of rank-and-file members being blocked from having a vote in the inevitable leadership contest that will follow next week’s result. Surely that cannot be true. There really would be a civil war in the party if that happened.
MiC with a new one 🚨New @Moreincommon_ voting intention finds a tie for third place and a Lib Dem campaign high. Labour lead by 15. 🔵CON 24 (+1) 🔴LAB 39 (-1) 🟠LIB DEM 13 (+2) 🟣REF UK 13 (-1) 🟢GRN 5 (-) 🟡SNP 3 (-) Dates: 26-28/6 N: 3,361 Tables: moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/votin…
That's close to what I am expecting - a few more off Reform and a couple more to the Tories by polling day.
Reform have an ugly stench around them now on racism, Putinism and Farage strops.
I can't see too many sensible British people going for them on the day, in reality.
My ex wife is weirdly keen on Reform. 27 years old. Ex Corbyn voter
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
I think Reform will quite significantly underperform their polling on the night.
Reports of the death of the Tory party are exaggerated. But they certainly need to be punished and brought down a peg or two hundred.
The worry would be that if they don't get the hammering of a lifetime there's little incentive to change the things badly wrong with the Conservative Party, and the media/policy ecosystem that surrounds it - which has also been disastrous for the country.
Anything above the 1997 result and they'll go "well we had a good run, and lost votes to Reform so it wasn't that bad, we'll be back in when the public turn on Labour". Then carry on being the performatively dumb, offensive circus they've become.
The Augean Stables need cleaning and large parts of the Tory Party and its hangers on need a lesson they never forget, that forces them to fundamentally rethink how they do things.
If they get the hammering of a lifetime and fall below the LDs on seats and Reform on votes as well as massively behind Labour on both they won't rethink anything because the Tories won't exist in 5-10 years time. They will be taken over by ReformUK and end up led by Nigel Farage
That would still be a preferable outcome to a result that allows them to stick their heads in the sand. Fairly clear some Tory MPs wouldn't take a Reform takeover lying down. Something would have to emerge on the moderate right too.
Not necessarily, as Canada showed a few wet Tories might go Liberal but most Tories would join Reform under FPTP and form a new Conservative party
Except as I've already shown you, Reform (CA) was never the National Front. They were Cameroon Conservatives.
They were NOT if they were Cameroon Conservatives they would have still voted for the wet Progressive Conservatives or the Canadian Liberals. The Canadian Reform party were ideologically small state and socially conservative, far closer to Farage than Cameron
I think that's a misapprehension of the Reform Party of Canada, which was a regionalist centre-right party with two principled aspirations that were probably incompatible: to reform the constitution and expand east of the Prairies. Demand to reopen the constitution debate in the nineties was pretty low. Early member Stephen Harper led the first Conservative government after the merger and it was the most profoundly centrist entity to have existed this side of the financial crisis.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
Harris as she would remain VP as well as taking office as President until a replacement is chosen
I don't think that's right. I believe the responsibilities of VP (of which there are few but officiating over electoral vote count is one) would pass to Mike Johnson as Speaker.
However, I doubt they'd refuse to confirm any reasonable choice. The House GOP is increasingly extreme but there are enough who'd either confirm or abstain.
No they wouldn't, the VP would remain as elected by the Congress in 2020, the Constitution only says the Speaker fills the role of President if both the President and VP are dead or incapacitated. If the VP is still alive and kicking they retain the role, the Speaker doesn't fill it
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Section 1 of the 25th amendment says when the presidency is vacated, the VP becomes President. Then section 2 immediately begins "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of VP..." I am pretty sure that would be interpreted as implying becoming President equates to the office of VP being vacated (as well as basic logic doing so).
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I’m surprised Pannick has this view . The child can go to a state school . The Labour policy isn’t stopping the child’s education.
Dan Neidle has pointed out that it all depends on what instructions he has given.
FWIW the bigger concern private schools should have is around the tax point. Currently schools are taking in millions in fees in advance hoping to dodge VAT (one client took in almost a million a day in the week after the GE). Many schools are screwing this up & making their FIA obvious tax dodges that won't work. Even the ones that aren't may be in trouble though - for Neidle's view is that the tax point is the start of the year and that parents are buying x years of education, rather than 1 education. As such the tax point would fall at the start of the school year the year of education starts in - if the courts take a similar view then schools will still have to pay VAT on the fees, which means they're effectively selling the education for 90% (schools on average will reclaim half the VAT they have to charge in fees) of normal price (even before the FIA discount).
Yes, I've read about this. It seems to go as follows:
1. Labour's plan to charge VAT on school fees will be unaffordable for many ordinary families like us who scrimp and save to afford the fees.
2. Therefore, to avoid the VAT charge we've managed to find enough money to pay 5-10 years' fees in advance.
It all kind of misses the bigger point.
FWIW when I went to private school (a minor one) lots of my peers were the scions of minor local businessmen. Sons of doctors, corner shop owners, the local lawyers' son etc. Even just a decade latter they've been priced out - fees at my school have doubled in that time.
I can't for the life of me work out why. £10-15kpa is the sweet spot to scoop up lots of people in the £60-80k bracket, but the entire market has ran away from them, and with it public sympathy.
FWIW I also deal with a lot of legacies, and we're having fun issues with whether school fees really are gifts out of surplus income now the fees are so large. So even that route (grandparents sell a house they bought for £3.50 in the 70s for £4.5m), reinvest and pay the school fees of the grandchildren is under threat.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
MiC with a new one 🚨New @Moreincommon_ voting intention finds a tie for third place and a Lib Dem campaign high. Labour lead by 15. 🔵CON 24 (+1) 🔴LAB 39 (-1) 🟠LIB DEM 13 (+2) 🟣REF UK 13 (-1) 🟢GRN 5 (-) 🟡SNP 3 (-) Dates: 26-28/6 N: 3,361 Tables: moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/votin…
That's close to what I am expecting - a few more off Reform and a couple more to the Tories by polling day.
Reform have an ugly stench around them now on racism, Putinism and Farage strops.
I can't see too many sensible British people going for them on the day, in reality.
My ex wife is weirdly keen on Reform. 27 years old. Ex Corbyn voter
The hot crazy matrix, huh.
She married Leon, it tells us she has really bad judgment in all things.
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
They look like them.
Only if you never had the 'pleasure' of experiencing the NF first hand.
I was chased by a group of them with a friend of mine. He is black. We were walking threw Bristol city centre in the late seventies. We had a 300 yard start on them. They started screaming at us after we walked past them. Luckily for us they started to run after they shouted abuse. We legged it. We could do the 1500 metres in 5.00 minutes in those days so we lost them.
Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
There should be little doubt that Ukip 2015 absorbed the BNP 2010 vote. Many of their very largest swings were in areas which had previously had BNP votes in the 3-6k range. But I wouldn't overegg the good-un argument or assume that it was unintentional - in the 2015 debates, he asserted that African immigrants were spreading AIDS throughout Britain. The recent campaign has further clarified that he wants to keep the racists onside at arm's length. He says he doesn't want to associate with them. But he doesn't kick them out either.
Agreed and I'm not really meaning to excuse Reform's tolerance of racism within its ranks. Nevertheless I think the UK as a whole benefits from the detoxifying of debate that the destruction of the BNP heralded.
Controversial opinion (1): Farage's first answer on QT is an under-reported fact of right-wing politics and deserves credit. (He said that he has done more than anyone else in UK politics to drive out the far right). There was a market for Nick Griffin's BNP a decade or so ago; largely those voters are now Reform voters. Reform, for all it's faults, is no BNP. I doubt there was any intention on Farage's part, but I think he's right.
Controversial opinion (2): Biden's performance at the debate last night wasn't as bad as the media is making out. Take out the stumble over Medicaid and (the first half, which is all I've got through so far) wasn't that different from his State of the Union address. The Medicaid stumble was bad, yes, but I got the impression from commenters that it was a disaster start to finish. It wasn't. I still think he very much should not be the Dem nominee as he has lost the narrative entirely, and will be far from capable in 4 years time, but last night was not quite the ongoing car crash I expected (perhaps I had just had my expectations set firmly by commentary!)
If Farage has done a good job in suppressing the BNP, the job of the next Tory leader will be to suppress Reform. No way back without doing that first.
Suppressing Labour will be a far larger market.
No, of course you're not, I shouldn't suggest so. The BNP posed a threat of violence in its target (sic) areas which Reform UK does not.
The Telegraph have the latest from their "Secret candidate":
It’s now been five weeks since Rishi called the election and I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I will lose my seat.
It is particularly depressing given that this could have been avoided. If the polls had narrowed to 10 points or below I could have won the seat against the odds. That’s the sense I keep getting on the doorstep – that it would have been possible. Yet we’re still 20 points behind.
There’s only so far that personal popularity in a constituency can get you with the shortcomings of the national campaign and the shortcomings of the Prime Minister that we’ve got.
Now I’m grappling with the depressing fact that, having put everything into this constituency and worked incredibly hard, it’s all going to have been in vain – because of factors beyond my control.
It is painful to keep motivating myself to get out and campaign when, realistically, I’m probably just looking at different degrees of defeat. The sole thing motivating me is the desire to secure a respectable loss. That’s very much not how I thought things would be when I was looking ahead to the election a few months ago.
For many of us, there is a deep, underlying anger at Rishi’s handling of the campaign and his extraordinary decision to call the election now. Speaking to several candidates the other day about how the campaign was going, there was a mixture between all of us of white hot anger and just sheer despondency.
The reason that the odds were quite good on the prospect of an early election – on which some of my senior colleagues were foolishly betting – is because most people who knew anything about politics thought it would be a bad decision. That has been proven to be the case.
Today has been Rishi’s best day. I got the impression he had managed to escape his minders and act like a normal human being. It won’t be enough, but it might save a few seats, possibly even that of the Secret Candidate.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
What has that got to do with a “Professional” (sic) association suppressing evidence and ignoring financial conflicts of interest in their advice on children?
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
Absolutely nothing.
What you're talking about is some kind of clever gotcha, what I'm talking about is actually knowing and being friends with trans people in real life, who are kind, and sweet, and just want to be left alone.
FWIW, most trans people consider WPATH to be actually *hostile* to them by medicalising their condition, much as homosexuality has been medicalised in the past. But you wouldn't know that. Because you've never sat down and had a cup of coffee with a trans person - mtf or ftm - and just chatted to them about life.
If you could actually do that, you'd realise they're much the same as you and I, and just as autonomous, and just as capable of making up their own minds about how they want to live their lives.
I could spend the next x hours arguing this with you, or sending you links to stuff that shows how trans teen suicides rose after availability of healthcare services were cut. But I'm not here to debate that.
Trans people are lovely and kind. They are also assholes, and ignorant. They are happy and sad, they are artists and designers, they are economists and business owners - they are just human beings like the rest of us. I know this, because I count several as my friends.
If you want to keep on banging the drum you want to keep banging, that's your choice. But I highly suggest you just sit down and talk with a couple of the people whose lives you're actually talking about, before you judge them.
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
(Feel free to exceed your picture quota if it helps your answer.)
She offered the “impossible experience”. She pretended to be your wife, acted moody and when you asked what was wrong she actually told you rather than said “nothing”, she would ask if she looked ok before going out and took onboard your honest opinion and then, when you said you would rather just stay in and watch tv she said that’s fine and actually meant it. Worth every Penny as it’s a fantasy situation you will never get in real life.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
Harris as she would remain VP as well as taking office as President until a replacement is chosen
I don't think that's right. I believe the responsibilities of VP (of which there are few but officiating over electoral vote count is one) would pass to Mike Johnson as Speaker.
However, I doubt they'd refuse to confirm any reasonable choice. The House GOP is increasingly extreme but there are enough who'd either confirm or abstain.
No they wouldn't, the VP would remain as elected by the Congress in 2020, the Constitution only says the Speaker fills the role of President if both the President and VP are dead or incapacitated. If the VP is still alive and kicking they retain the role, the Speaker doesn't fill it
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Section 1 of the 25th amendment says when the presidency is vacated, the VP becomes President. Then section 2 immediately begins "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of VP..." I am pretty sure that would be interpreted as implying becoming President equates to the office of VP being vacated (as well as basic logic doing so).
'Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.' Nothing whatsoever about the Speaker taking office as VP in the meantime until the new VP nominated by the President is confirmed by Congress
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
They look like them.
Only if you never had the 'pleasure' of experiencing the NF first hand.
I was chased by a group of them with a friend of mine. He is black. We were walking threw Bristol city centre in the late seventies. We had a 300 yard start on them. They started screaming at us after we walked past them. Luckily for us they started to run after they shouted abuse. We legged it. We could do the 1500 metres in 5.00 minutes in those days so we lost them.
In which case you should know not to make comparisons with Reform. And you were luckier than I was. I ended up in hospital after my run ins with them. And once in the cells as well.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
How does Carlotta know that that hasn't happened? (I was surprised when this strange lady said "Hello Carnyx" when I was visiting my former workplace. Couldn't make head nor tail of it till another colleague explained I knew this person of old ...)
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
I suspect @Farooq is more referring to the historic determinism derided by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism.
MiC with a new one 🚨New @Moreincommon_ voting intention finds a tie for third place and a Lib Dem campaign high. Labour lead by 15. 🔵CON 24 (+1) 🔴LAB 39 (-1) 🟠LIB DEM 13 (+2) 🟣REF UK 13 (-1) 🟢GRN 5 (-) 🟡SNP 3 (-) Dates: 26-28/6 N: 3,361 Tables: moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/votin…
That's close to what I am expecting - a few more off Reform and a couple more to the Tories by polling day.
Reform have an ugly stench around them now on racism, Putinism and Farage strops.
I can't see too many sensible British people going for them on the day, in reality.
My ex wife is weirdly keen on Reform. 27 years old. Ex Corbyn voter
Considering all I've read of your adventures since I started irregularly posting here (07/08/2014 - (christ - almost a decade)) that fact does not surprise me in the slightest. Sounds like she was top right on every man's most crucial chart?
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
Maybe not quite, but they've got a nastier crank streak than UKIP, who for all their faults were after a specific policy change. Reform, like Galloway's Workers Party, really does seem to have attracted some proper wrong'uns who are attracted to an anti-establishment because their foul views are rightly not acceptable in mainstream parties.
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company money to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
The Telegraph have the latest from their "Secret candidate":
It’s now been five weeks since Rishi called the election and I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I will lose my seat.
It is particularly depressing given that this could have been avoided. If the polls had narrowed to 10 points or below I could have won the seat against the odds. That’s the sense I keep getting on the doorstep – that it would have been possible. Yet we’re still 20 points behind.
There’s only so far that personal popularity in a constituency can get you with the shortcomings of the national campaign and the shortcomings of the Prime Minister that we’ve got.
Now I’m grappling with the depressing fact that, having put everything into this constituency and worked incredibly hard, it’s all going to have been in vain – because of factors beyond my control.
It is painful to keep motivating myself to get out and campaign when, realistically, I’m probably just looking at different degrees of defeat. The sole thing motivating me is the desire to secure a respectable loss. That’s very much not how I thought things would be when I was looking ahead to the election a few months ago.
For many of us, there is a deep, underlying anger at Rishi’s handling of the campaign and his extraordinary decision to call the election now. Speaking to several candidates the other day about how the campaign was going, there was a mixture between all of us of white hot anger and just sheer despondency.
The reason that the odds were quite good on the prospect of an early election – on which some of my senior colleagues were foolishly betting – is because most people who knew anything about politics thought it would be a bad decision. That has been proven to be the case.
It can't be very difficult to work out who this is, from their style of writing. Not that I'm interested in doing so.
I love this internal Tory notion that the real issue was/is the timing of the election. I can't really see why it'd have gone much different had it been a, say, Sept/Oct election.
While I was delivering leaflets in my constituency this week, a man approaching retirement came up to me to say: “I want to tell you something. I voted for you last time. Not this time. I’m voting Reform.”
We ended up having a debate and by the end, it seemed probable that he would ultimately vote for me. But he wanted to show me how annoyed he was with the Conservatives nationally – particularly that we haven’t done enough to bring down levels of immigration. It’s difficult to blame him and there are many more like him. It’s an impossible task for us to win them all round before polling day.
Yesterday, when I asked another constituent whether they were voting for me, he replied: “Just about.” He said his “report card” that he wants me to communicate to Rishi Sunak is: “Must do better”.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of this election, though, is that we can no longer be confident that party members will vote Conservative. In several cases, what I thought would be a brief conversation asking a member to put a poster up has ended up being a 10-15-minute conversation trying to persuade them to vote for me.
One of the lower profile scandals that has really damaged us among the grassroots is the parachuting of favoured people like Richard Holden, the party chairman, into what No 10 would have considered safe seats. In fact, his behaviour has demotivated activists and also essentially stripped the party of a chairman during a general election campaign.
The party chairman should be the key attack dog during a campaign like this, on the airwaves all the time. But, since an initial car-crash interview on Sky after he was installed as candidate for Basildon and Billericay, he’s hardly been seen.
Now I’ve heard that senior figures on the Left of the party are floating the idea of rank-and-file members being blocked from having a vote in the inevitable leadership contest that will follow next week’s result. Surely that cannot be true. There really would be a civil war in the party if that happened.
When you say 'vote for me', are you standing as a candidate?
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
I don't want Reform to make any headway but you are wrong here. They are a very, very long way from being anything like NF.
They look like them.
Only if you never had the 'pleasure' of experiencing the NF first hand.
I was chased by a group of them with a friend of mine. He is black. We were walking threw Bristol city centre in the late seventies. We had a 300 yard start on them. They started screaming at us after we walked past them. Luckily for us they started to run after they shouted abuse. We legged it. We could do the 1500 metres in 5.00 minutes in those days so we lost them.
In which case you should know not to make comparisons with Reform. And you were luckier than I was. I ended up in hospital after my run ins with them. And once in the cells as well.
A horrid experience for you. I have met a few Reform type people. I am not a fan of them. I find them depressing, negative and ignorant. I admit I do not want to meet loads of them and analyse why they are the way they are. Just give them a wide birth and try and avoid them as much as possible. It take all sorts to make a world. Fair enough.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
What has that got to do with a “Professional” (sic) association suppressing evidence and ignoring financial conflicts of interest in their advice on children?
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
Absolutely nothing.
What you're talking about is some kind of clever gotcha, what I'm talking about is actually knowing and being friends with trans people in real life, who are kind, and sweet, and just want to be left alone.
FWIW, most trans people consider WPATH to be actually *hostile* to them by medicalising their condition, much as homosexuality has been medicalised in the past. But you wouldn't know that. Because you've never sat down and had a cup of coffee with a trans person - mtf or ftm - and just chatted to them about life.
If you could actually do that, you'd realise they're much the same as you and I, and just as autonomous, and just as capable of making up their own minds about how they want to live their lives.
I could spend the next x hours arguing this with you, or sending you links to stuff that shows how trans teen suicides rose after availability of healthcare services were cut. But I'm not here to debate that.
Trans people are lovely and kind. They are also assholes, and ignorant. They are happy and sad, they are artists and designers, they are economists and business owners - they are just human beings like the rest of us. I know this, because I count several as my friends.
If you want to keep on banging the drum you want to keep banging, that's your choice. But I highly suggest you just sit down and talk with a couple of the people whose lives you're actually talking about, before you judge them.
My criticism has been directed at WPATH and Trans activists not Trans people - they are who they are and good luck to them.
The treatment of confused children has been a scandal and is now being exposed.
I don't think any MP from the previous parliament will poll as badly as Rob Roberts is going to do in Clwyd East as an independent. He'll be lucky to get 500 votes.
I love this internal Tory notion that the real issue was/is the timing of the election. I can't really see why it'd have gone much different had it been a, say, Sept/Oct election.
You have to admit, it was very sneaky of PM Starmer to spring it on them out of the blue.
A married accountant is being sued for £1.1 million by his former bosses for allegedly spending tens of thousands of pounds of company money on escorts.
Father-of-two Mohammed Asif Khan, 45, is accused of “stealing” about £1.1 million of company money while working for North of England Coachworks, the North East’s biggest vehicle bodyshop.
The company says “self-styled director of finance” Mr Khan splashed out about £160,000 on payments to escorts – including £56,000 to £1,000-an-hour call girl and porn star Gemma Massey.
But while the married father admitted his “shame” after using company moneFor 56 hoursy to pay prostitutes, he insisted he did nothing wrong as his bosses knew how he was spending the money and were happy with the arrangement.
”I was ashamed of the things that happened – for my wife,” he told the High Court, but added: “The company didn’t care what I spent that money on.”
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
Harris as she would remain VP as well as taking office as President until a replacement is chosen
I don't think that's right. I believe the responsibilities of VP (of which there are few but officiating over electoral vote count is one) would pass to Mike Johnson as Speaker.
However, I doubt they'd refuse to confirm any reasonable choice. The House GOP is increasingly extreme but there are enough who'd either confirm or abstain.
No they wouldn't, the VP would remain as elected by the Congress in 2020, the Constitution only says the Speaker fills the role of President if both the President and VP are dead or incapacitated. If the VP is still alive and kicking they retain the role, the Speaker doesn't fill it
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Section 1 of the 25th amendment says when the presidency is vacated, the VP becomes President. Then section 2 immediately begins "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of VP..." I am pretty sure that would be interpreted as implying becoming President equates to the office of VP being vacated (as well as basic logic doing so).
'Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.' Nothing whatsoever about the Speaker taking office as VP in the meantime until the new VP nominated by the President is confirmed by Congress
I agree the Speaker doesn't take office as VP... they just assume their powers and duties under, I think, the Presidential Succession Act, until a VP is appointed.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
Let's take the many worlds hypothesis then. Every possibly action is actualised in divergent universes. But does that mean that a given outcome is inevitable? Of course not. Here's why: Stop and think about you're own perception. Unless there's something really profound about you you're not telling us, your perception is of a single timeline, a single universe. If Many Worlds is true, that means the "you" that is perceiving is the result of many divergent choices. There are infinite parallel "you"s in these other worlds. So if you predict that the next 20 coin tosses with all be heads, and then flip a coin 20 times, you'll almost certainly end up in a universe where it didn't happen. There a little less than a one in a million chance you get your coin tosses. You won't experience the twenty heads in a row, even though it "happened".
So in a navel gazing way, any prediction is inevitable, but also the NEGATION of that same prediction is also inevitable. You can think of inevitability in that way if you like, but you're then talking a different, technical, language that normal people in normal conversation don't.
The same is true of determinism though they are much stickier arguments to have. In the end they all boil down to the same thing: the denial of what is clearly available to all of us all the time. Nobody acts like determinism is true. You can pretend it makes sense on some level, but that's just the same same game as the coin toss scenario. The only thing you can convince people of if you pretend that they don't really have any choice is that philosophers can be the biggest pains in the arse.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
The Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, I think.
It was in an article about the January 6th insurrection and what would have happened if the Trumpers had executed Mike Pence.
Isn't it the President pro tempore of the Senate ?
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he would preside over the U.S. Senate debate surrounding disputes of the 2020 election results if Vice President Mike Pence does not show up.
He suggested Pence was not expected to attend but Grassley’s staff later said that was a “misinterpretation” and that Pence was expected to be there.
On Wednesday, Congress will meet to formally count the Electoral College votes after they were certified by states last month. At least 12 GOP senators and dozens of House Republicans say they intend to object to the Electoral College results as those votes are read, state by state, in a joint session that begins at noon CT Wednesday.
During an exchange with reporters on Tuesday, Grassley was asked how he plans to vote.
“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice President isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” according to a transcript of his remarks sent by a spokesperson.
Grassley serves as the president pro tempore of the Senate and will preside over any portion of the debate that Pence does not attend. But Grassley expects Pence to be present on Wednesday, according to his spokesperson.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
On 5th July we will know how many people agree with that view. I fear it will be many more that we would like.
If Reform get say 15%, it will not mean that 15% of voters agree with the extreme comments articulated above. A sizeable proportion of that 15% will be a protest against politics and politicians generally.
I love this internal Tory notion that the real issue was/is the timing of the election. I can't really see why it'd have gone much different had it been a, say, Sept/Oct election.
You have to admit, it was very sneaky of PM Starmer to spring it on them out of the blue.
I believe he had had enough. He did the right thing. Shut up the people in his party making his life a misery and opposition etc. Non stop abuse. Good on him and I cannot see calling it in October will have changed the result.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
I'm so sick and tired of the maximalists re:trans rights (pro & anti).
80% of every room can agree on 99% of how trans people live. Every trans person I know just wants to live their life without getting abused.
It's the maximalists that insist that single sex-rape centres are unreasonable, or that male women shouldn't be allowed to use the womens' loo, or sport should be a free for all that poison the well for everyone.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I’m surprised Pannick has this view . The child can go to a state school . The Labour policy isn’t stopping the child’s education.
Though people do have a right to choose.
Are any other educational materials or facilities subject to VAT?
I don't believe educational books are, I believe they're exempt?
If all educational stuff is exempt except one thing, then there's a case to be argued.
All books are zero-rated aren't they?
Yes. All written materials. Newspapers, magazines, books.
Actually I thought books designed to be written in were VAT rated, except for educational materials? May be wrong on that though.
3.1 Books and booklets These normally consist of text or illustrations, bound in a cover stiffer than their pages. They may be printed in any language or characters (including Braille or shorthand), photocopied, typed or hand-written, so long as they are found in book or booklet form.
Supplies of any of the following are zero-rated:
literary works reference books directories and catalogues antique books collections of letters or documents permanently bound in covers loose-leaf books, manuals or instructions, whether complete with their binder or not amendments to zero-rated loose-leaf books, even if issued separately School work books and other educational texts in question and answer format, are zero-rated because the spaces provided for the insertion of answers are incidental to the essential character of the book or booklet. The same applies to exam papers in question and answer format provided they qualify as books, booklets, brochures, pamphlets or leaflets.
But supplies of the following are standard-rated:
books of plans or drawings for industrial, architectural, engineering, commercial or similar purposes picture card and stamp albums, unless they contain a substantial amount of reading matter which is complete in itself, and no more than 25% of the album is set aside for the mounting of cards and stamps completed stamp albums products that are essentially stationery items, for example, diaries and address books
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
I suspect @Farooq is more referring to the historic determinism derided by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism.
My reaction to Popper is always Crazy name, crazy guy.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
What has that got to do with a “Professional” (sic) association suppressing evidence and ignoring financial conflicts of interest in their advice on children?
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
Absolutely nothing.
What you're talking about is some kind of clever gotcha, what I'm talking about is actually knowing and being friends with trans people in real life, who are kind, and sweet, and just want to be left alone.
FWIW, most trans people consider WPATH to be actually *hostile* to them by medicalising their condition, much as homosexuality has been medicalised in the past. But you wouldn't know that. Because you've never sat down and had a cup of coffee with a trans person - mtf or ftm - and just chatted to them about life.
If you could actually do that, you'd realise they're much the same as you and I, and just as autonomous, and just as capable of making up their own minds about how they want to live their lives.
I could spend the next x hours arguing this with you, or sending you links to stuff that shows how trans teen suicides rose after availability of healthcare services were cut. But I'm not here to debate that.
Trans people are lovely and kind. They are also assholes, and ignorant. They are happy and sad, they are artists and designers, they are economists and business owners - they are just human beings like the rest of us. I know this, because I count several as my friends.
If you want to keep on banging the drum you want to keep banging, that's your choice. But I highly suggest you just sit down and talk with a couple of the people whose lives you're actually talking about, before you judge them.
My criticism has been directed at WPATH and Trans activists not Trans people - they are who they are and good luck to them.
The treatment of confused children has been a scandal and is now being exposed.
Sounds like we agree on WPATH?
I don't personally have a take on WPATH. The trans people I know think it's nonsense, and actively harmful to them, because it restricts them from the care they need.
As far as confused children go, if you're ever in London I could ask a couple of people to talk to you, say, a trans friend who's mtf who knew at age 12 who is my age and transitioned in their teens. Or a ftm who transitioned in their 30s but wishes the tools and resources had been available to them to come out when they were a teenager.
Gentleness is a virtue, and the trans people I know tend to say "I knew from much younger, I wish I could have done it sooner, but I was afraid to come out because of all the hatred I'd get".
Be kind. That's all I can say. That's all there is worth saying in this world, at the end of the day.
Why didn’t the BBC highlight this. Bruce mentioned other comments from different candidates but these were jaw dropping .
Because the BBC want Reform to do well. Conflict means more people watch BBC News. It’s why they also support Trump, Putin and Le Pen, as much as they can get away with.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
Harris as she would remain VP as well as taking office as President until a replacement is chosen
I don't think that's right. I believe the responsibilities of VP (of which there are few but officiating over electoral vote count is one) would pass to Mike Johnson as Speaker.
However, I doubt they'd refuse to confirm any reasonable choice. The House GOP is increasingly extreme but there are enough who'd either confirm or abstain.
No they wouldn't, the VP would remain as elected by the Congress in 2020, the Constitution only says the Speaker fills the role of President if both the President and VP are dead or incapacitated. If the VP is still alive and kicking they retain the role, the Speaker doesn't fill it
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Section 1 of the 25th amendment says when the presidency is vacated, the VP becomes President. Then section 2 immediately begins "Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of VP..." I am pretty sure that would be interpreted as implying becoming President equates to the office of VP being vacated (as well as basic logic doing so).
'Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.' Nothing whatsoever about the Speaker taking office as VP in the meantime until the new VP nominated by the President is confirmed by Congress
I agree the Speaker doesn't take office as VP... they just assume their powers and duties under, I think, the Presidential Succession Act, until a VP is appointed.
The Presidential Succession Act only applies to the office of President though not VP, as it states 'An Act To provide for the performance of the duties of the office of President in case of the removal, resignation, death, or inability both of the President and Vice President'
Why didn’t the BBC highlight this. Bruce mentioned other comments from different candidates but these were jaw dropping .
Because the BBC want Reform to do well. Conflict means more people watch BBC News. It’s why they also support Trump, Putin and Le Pen, as much as they can get away with.
I'm a little surprised they haven't suspended him, but then Labour haven't suspended their Clacton candidate either for similarly offensive remarks similarly made 4 years ago on social media.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
Let's take the many worlds hypothesis then. Every possibly action is actualised in divergent universes. But does that mean that a given outcome is inevitable? Of course not. Here's why: Stop and think about you're own perception. Unless there's something really profound about you you're not telling us, your perception is of a single timeline, a single universe. If Many Worlds is true, that means the "you" that is perceiving is the result of many divergent choices. There are infinite parallel "you"s in these other worlds. So if you predict that the next 20 coin tosses with all be heads, and then flip a coin 20 times, you'll almost certainly end up in a universe where it didn't happen. There a little less than a one in a million chance you get your coin tosses. You won't experience the twenty heads in a row, even though it "happened".
So in a navel gazing way, any prediction is inevitable, but also the NEGATION of that same prediction is also inevitable. You can think of inevitability in that way if you like, but you're then talking a different, technical, language that normal people in normal conversation don't.
The same is true of determinism though they are much stickier arguments to have. In the end they all boil down to the same thing: the denial of what is clearly available to all of us all the time. Nobody acts like determinism is true. You can pretend it makes sense on some level, but that's just the same same game as the coin toss scenario. The only thing you can convince people of if you pretend that they don't really have any choice is that philosophers can be the biggest pains in the arse.
Say Biden resigns and Harris becomes President. The Vice Presidency is vacant. Harris is allowed to nominate her replacement, but Congress blocks it (the GOP playing silly b*gets in the House).
Who presides over the electoral vote count in January if no Vice President is seated at that time?
The Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, I think.
It was in an article about the January 6th insurrection and what would have happened if the Trumpers had executed Mike Pence.
Isn't it the President pro tempore of the Senate ?
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he would preside over the U.S. Senate debate surrounding disputes of the 2020 election results if Vice President Mike Pence does not show up.
He suggested Pence was not expected to attend but Grassley’s staff later said that was a “misinterpretation” and that Pence was expected to be there.
On Wednesday, Congress will meet to formally count the Electoral College votes after they were certified by states last month. At least 12 GOP senators and dozens of House Republicans say they intend to object to the Electoral College results as those votes are read, state by state, in a joint session that begins at noon CT Wednesday.
During an exchange with reporters on Tuesday, Grassley was asked how he plans to vote.
“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice President isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” according to a transcript of his remarks sent by a spokesperson.
Grassley serves as the president pro tempore of the Senate and will preside over any portion of the debate that Pence does not attend. But Grassley expects Pence to be present on Wednesday, according to his spokesperson.
Interesting that there were suggestions beforehand that Pence might not show up.
Yes, I think you're right on reflection. Technically the "President of the Senate" presides in certifying the vote. In the absence of a VP, the President pro tempore would be President of the Senate. So Patty Murray.
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
Depends on your definition of 'Tories', surely?
People voting Tory this time? Well of course you're right by definition but it's a meaningless assertion. People who voted Tory in 2019? I think all the evidence suggest about 1/3/ have switched to Reform. Tory members? Hard to tell but many seem to prefer Reform-style populist policies.
How many Tories here are still voting for the party but would never vote for Farage?
TSE? MarqueeMark? BigG? Probably more I've forgot.
None of the last 10 polls posted on wiki show the Tories reaching 100 seats when plugged into EC, and 8 of those polls show the LDs winning more seats than the Tories. Just saying.
That's basically herding around Electoral Calculus's algorithm though.
As someone who's probably* voting LibDem on Thursday I want to believe. But we are putting a lot of trust in what is basically Martin Baxter's opinion.
I am not optimistic on LibDem gains on Thursday. I suspect the outer Blue Wall is basically going to be 40-35-25 (take off a few % for Reform but that'll be the share between the big three). The LibDems will end up with 35-40 seats - which, let's be fair, is a massive improvement on 12. But becoming the official opposition is hat-eating territory.
* Turns out the independent socialist in our constituency is really good! I'm almost tempted to vote for her as a "screw you" to the absolutely appalling apparatchik who's guaranteed to get in as Labour candidate.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
Let's take the many worlds hypothesis then. Every possibly action is actualised in divergent universes. But does that mean that a given outcome is inevitable? Of course not. Here's why: Stop and think about you're own perception. Unless there's something really profound about you you're not telling us, your perception is of a single timeline, a single universe. If Many Worlds is true, that means the "you" that is perceiving is the result of many divergent choices. There are infinite parallel "you"s in these other worlds. So if you predict that the next 20 coin tosses with all be heads, and then flip a coin 20 times, you'll almost certainly end up in a universe where it didn't happen. There a little less than a one in a million chance you get your coin tosses. You won't experience the twenty heads in a row, even though it "happened".
So in a navel gazing way, any prediction is inevitable, but also the NEGATION of that same prediction is also inevitable. You can think of inevitability in that way if you like, but you're then talking a different, technical, language that normal people in normal conversation don't.
The same is true of determinism though they are much stickier arguments to have. In the end they all boil down to the same thing: the denial of what is clearly available to all of us all the time. Nobody acts like determinism is true. You can pretend it makes sense on some level, but that's just the same same game as the coin toss scenario. The only thing you can convince people of if you pretend that they don't really have any choice is that philosophers can be the biggest pains in the arse.
That's much more like it.
Are you kidding? Second paragraph, first line. "you're" when I meant "your". I ought to be electrocuted for that.
Course, I couldn't help it. It was my genes and my atoms and the bad tummy I've got from last night's curry.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I’m surprised Pannick has this view . The child can go to a state school . The Labour policy isn’t stopping the child’s education.
Though people do have a right to choose.
Are any other educational materials or facilities subject to VAT?
I don't believe educational books are, I believe they're exempt?
If all educational stuff is exempt except one thing, then there's a case to be argued.
All books are zero-rated aren't they?
Yes. All written materials. Newspapers, magazines, books.
Actually I thought books designed to be written in were VAT rated, except for educational materials? May be wrong on that though.
3.1 Books and booklets These normally consist of text or illustrations, bound in a cover stiffer than their pages. They may be printed in any language or characters (including Braille or shorthand), photocopied, typed or hand-written, so long as they are found in book or booklet form.
Supplies of any of the following are zero-rated:
literary works reference books directories and catalogues antique books collections of letters or documents permanently bound in covers loose-leaf books, manuals or instructions, whether complete with their binder or not amendments to zero-rated loose-leaf books, even if issued separately School work books and other educational texts in question and answer format, are zero-rated because the spaces provided for the insertion of answers are incidental to the essential character of the book or booklet. The same applies to exam papers in question and answer format provided they qualify as books, booklets, brochures, pamphlets or leaflets.
But supplies of the following are standard-rated:
books of plans or drawings for industrial, architectural, engineering, commercial or similar purposes picture card and stamp albums, unless they contain a substantial amount of reading matter which is complete in itself, and no more than 25% of the album is set aside for the mounting of cards and stamps completed stamp albums products that are essentially stationery items, for example, diaries and address books
MiC with a new one 🚨New @Moreincommon_ voting intention finds a tie for third place and a Lib Dem campaign high. Labour lead by 15. 🔵CON 24 (+1) 🔴LAB 39 (-1) 🟠LIB DEM 13 (+2) 🟣REF UK 13 (-1) 🟢GRN 5 (-) 🟡SNP 3 (-) Dates: 26-28/6 N: 3,361 Tables: moreincommon.org.uk/our-work/votin…
That's close to what I am expecting - a few more off Reform and a couple more to the Tories by polling day.
Reform have an ugly stench around them now on racism, Putinism and Farage strops.
I can't see too many sensible British people going for them on the day, in reality.
My ex wife is weirdly keen on Reform. 27 years old. Ex Corbyn voter
Corbyn, Farage, you. Weirdest remake of "Mamma Mia!" evah.
Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.
I don’t know what will happen, but I know that, if you’re on the campaign, you have to pretend you’re sticking with Biden until the announcement that he’s going, so Obama saying this isn’t really evidence of anything. What Obama is saying behind closed doors is more important, and we don’t know what that is. But I’m sure Biden and Harris will both listen to him.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
Of course, such news is unwelcome to those who spend their lives writing stories, but real life isn't a story. It's not an arc you plot out and tell. It's a bunch of stuff that happens. You can think you spot a trend and then it all goes to shit because events, dear boy.
The future isn't written. If you believe it is, you have to undo the whole of not just philosophy but physics too.
And even if it was, only someone who literally thought himself a god could possibly predict it.
Once more, when people talk about something years off in politics being "inevitable", they are lying to you.
I can't see what you are responding to, but don't be silly. There's whole schools of philosophy called things like determinism and predeterminism and actualism which precisely claim that the future is written. As for physics the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics says pretty much that the futures are all written. Don't exaggerate.
I suspect @Farooq is more referring to the historic determinism derided by Popper in The Poverty of Historicism.
My reaction to Popper is always Crazy name, crazy guy.
I always thought he and Hari Seldon would have an interesting conversation.
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
Depends on your definition of 'Tories', surely?
People voting Tory this time? Well of course you're right by definition but it's a meaningless assertion. People who voted Tory in 2019? I think all the evidence suggest about 1/3/ have switched to Reform. Tory members? Hard to tell but many seem to prefer Reform-style populist policies.
How many Tories here are still voting for the party but would never vote for Farage?
TSE? MarqueeMark? BigG? Probably more I've forgot.
Thoughts and prayers for all those Tories who want to leave the ECHR but hate Labour's attack on private schools.
FWIW - I think Lord Pannick is wrong.
Sir Keir Starmer’s planned VAT raid on private schools is likely to breach human rights law, The Telegraph can reveal.
The Labour leader risks falling foul of European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) law over his party’s flagship policy, one of Britain’s top constitutional and human rights lawyers has warned.
Lord Pannick, who has taken on some of the UK’s most high-profile court cases, backed legal advice warning that making private schools subject to VAT was likely to breach ECHR law.
He told The Telegraph: “It would be strongly arguable that for a new government to impose VAT on independent schools would breach the right to education.
I agree with you that I think he's wrong. Strikes me as, if I may describe it this... Peak lawyer brain. Now Pannick is an excellent silk, employed by iirc Man City and Bozza recently. But the connection he's made there is one only a lawyer would ever conceivably dream up. Legislation A + Act in fact B = 465.765
The interesting point is that it is not just his opinion but one that has apparently been held by a whole series of senior legal figures going back to the 80s. According to the article it was one advanced by Law Lords back in the 80s and 90s against Labour plans to either abolish or change the tax status of private schools. Now I have no idea if they are right but it seems that this is a principle that has been well established amongst the legal fraternity going back over 4 decades rather than something just dreamt up by Lord Pannick.
I very much doubt whether Pannick believes any such thing. The great thing which gets in the way of the rights of every child from a back street in Accrington or Rochdale to attend Winchester or Eton is fees the schools charge, not VAT.
The argument that the right to an education = the right of the right sort to go to Eton will delight the judges of the ECHR.
Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November.
I don’t know what will happen, but I know that, if you’re on the campaign, you have to pretend you’re sticking with Biden until the announcement that he’s going, so Obama saying this isn’t really evidence of anything. What Obama is saying behind closed doors is more important, and we don’t know what that is. But I’m sure Biden and Harris will both listen to him.
I know there’s a lot else going on, but meanwhile in the Excited States the wheels are coming off the gender abattoir, as inevitably they ended up in the courts. Discovery is a wonderful thing…
Thread: (WPATH = World Professional Association for Transgender Health)
This summarizes the Alabama Attorney General's assessment of @WPATH, based on a trove of subpoenaed internal communications that have been unsealed this week, plus more yet to be unsealed: "In short, neither the Court nor Alabama need treat WPATH as anything other than the activist interest group it has shown itself to be. The Constitution allows States to reject WPATH’s model of “care” and protect vulnerable minors from life-altering transitioning “treatments.” The Court should grant Defendants summary judgment."
I really wish you could actually meet a trans person.
What has that got to do with a “Professional” (sic) association suppressing evidence and ignoring financial conflicts of interest in their advice on children?
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
Absolutely nothing.
What you're talking about is some kind of clever gotcha, what I'm talking about is actually knowing and being friends with trans people in real life, who are kind, and sweet, and just want to be left alone.
FWIW, most trans people consider WPATH to be actually *hostile* to them by medicalising their condition, much as homosexuality has been medicalised in the past. But you wouldn't know that. Because you've never sat down and had a cup of coffee with a trans person - mtf or ftm - and just chatted to them about life.
If you could actually do that, you'd realise they're much the same as you and I, and just as autonomous, and just as capable of making up their own minds about how they want to live their lives.
I could spend the next x hours arguing this with you, or sending you links to stuff that shows how trans teen suicides rose after availability of healthcare services were cut. But I'm not here to debate that.
Trans people are lovely and kind. They are also assholes, and ignorant. They are happy and sad, they are artists and designers, they are economists and business owners - they are just human beings like the rest of us. I know this, because I count several as my friends.
If you want to keep on banging the drum you want to keep banging, that's your choice. But I highly suggest you just sit down and talk with a couple of the people whose lives you're actually talking about, before you judge them.
My criticism has been directed at WPATH and Trans activists not Trans people - they are who they are and good luck to them.
The treatment of confused children has been a scandal and is now being exposed.
Sounds like we agree on WPATH?
I don't personally have a take on WPATH. The trans people I know think it's nonsense, and actively harmful to them, because it restricts them from the care they need.
As far as confused children go, if you're ever in London I could ask a couple of people to talk to you, say, a trans friend who's mtf who knew at age 12 who is my age and transitioned in their teens. Or a ftm who transitioned in their 30s but wishes the tools and resources had been available to them to come out when they were a teenager.
Gentleness is a virtue, and the trans people I know tend to say "I knew from much younger, I wish I could have done it sooner, but I was afraid to come out because of all the hatred I'd get".
Be kind. That's all I can say. That's all there is worth saying in this world, at the end of the day.
The issue, as Cass identified, is that clinicians simply don’t know which children will persist in their gender distress, and which will not - with ~80% turning out to be same sex attracted or bi. With the recent significant growth in transition medication I suspect we will see growing numbers of now young adults regretting their choices. This is not about trans rights - this is about medical malpractice on vulnerable children.
None of the last 10 polls posted on wiki show the Tories reaching 100 seats when plugged into EC, and 8 of those polls show the LDs winning more seats than the Tories. Just saying.
That's basically herding around Electoral Calculus's algorithm though.
As someone who's probably* voting LibDem on Thursday I want to believe. But we are putting a lot of trust in what is basically Martin Baxter's opinion.
I am not optimistic on LibDem gains on Thursday. I suspect the outer Blue Wall is basically going to be 40-35-25 (take off a few % for Reform but that'll be the share between the big three). The LibDems will end up with 35-40 seats - which, let's be fair, is a massive improvement on 12. But becoming the official opposition is hat-eating territory.
* Turns out the independent socialist in our constituency is really good! I'm almost tempted to vote for her as a "screw you" to the absolutely appalling apparatchik who's guaranteed to get in as Labour candidate.
Survation MRP also has the Tories ahead of the LDs on seats tonight. Baxter on the other hand in their MRP had Labour gaining Brentwood and Ongar but IDS holding Chingford and the Tories holding Harlow which is a brave call as Sir Humphrey would say (Survation thinks the opposite).
PB consensus is that Reform will underperfom on the night.
And... I tend to agree. I suspect that they will end up on roughly the same vote share as the LibDems (i.e. 13%) on the night. I suspect that they'll win Ashfield and Clacton, and a couple of other seats, but that they will suffer from being -effectively- the official opposition to Labour in the North, and to the Conservatives in the East.
My view is that Reform draws principally from the same pool as UKIP 2015 and from people who voted Leave, but don't normally vote. I think there is going to be some negative impact from the lack of Councillors, voting records, posters, leaflets, tellers, knocker-uppers, etc. Now, sure, these things aren't essential. But if you're in the mid-teens, they can make the difference between an efficiently and an inefficiently distributed vote. I would point out that the LibDems (and their predecessors) only broke through at the national level after they'd built up enough local strength to convince people that they aren't likely to be a wasted voted.
Now, I could be wrong. It is possible that you see the Conservative vote collapse towards Reform, as happened in Canada in 1993. But I think Farage is a pretty divisive figure, and that puts a ceiling on his support.
I'd like to point out too that although Farage named his new Party after the Canadian precedent in an attempt to get this sort of comparison, the two could not be further apart.
Reform (CA) was founded due to extremely legitimate concerns from the Western provinces that had been overlooked, taken for granted and treated badly compared to Ottawa which was looking after itself with the Western provinces money and Quebec which was getting treated much better due to it's threatening independence.
Reform (NF) is the National Front.
Redfield has Reform on 18% in their latest poll, Reform Canada got 18% in 1993, polling wise Reform is closer to their Canadian cousins now than NF got anywhere near ever
Redfield are wrong.
And even if they do get 18% (they won't) the difference is Canada's Conservatives and and Canada's Reform could address by resolving the policy divide of the issues the Western Provinces rightly objected to.
Reform (CA) were more like Cameroon Conservatives than Nigel Farage, with the whole in Salmond's pocket etc being what Reform were objecting to.
Tories won't vote for the National Front whatever NF call themselves.
Depends on your definition of 'Tories', surely?
People voting Tory this time? Well of course you're right by definition but it's a meaningless assertion. People who voted Tory in 2019? I think all the evidence suggest about 1/3/ have switched to Reform. Tory members? Hard to tell but many seem to prefer Reform-style populist policies.
How many Tories here are still voting for the party but would never vote for Farage?
TSE? MarqueeMark? BigG? Probably more I've forgot.
Comments
1. Labour's plan to charge VAT on school fees will be unaffordable for many ordinary families like us who scrimp and save to afford the fees.
2. Therefore, to avoid the VAT charge we've managed to find enough money to pay 5-10 years' fees in advance.
Read the thread - the evidence is from their own files…
(Feel free to exceed your picture quota if it helps your answer.)
It’s now been five weeks since Rishi called the election and I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I will lose my seat.
It is particularly depressing given that this could have been avoided. If the polls had narrowed to 10 points or below I could have won the seat against the odds. That’s the sense I keep getting on the doorstep – that it would have been possible. Yet we’re still 20 points behind.
There’s only so far that personal popularity in a constituency can get you with the shortcomings of the national campaign and the shortcomings of the Prime Minister that we’ve got.
Now I’m grappling with the depressing fact that, having put everything into this constituency and worked incredibly hard, it’s all going to have been in vain – because of factors beyond my control.
It is painful to keep motivating myself to get out and campaign when, realistically, I’m probably just looking at different degrees of defeat. The sole thing motivating me is the desire to secure a respectable loss. That’s very much not how I thought things would be when I was looking ahead to the election a few months ago.
For many of us, there is a deep, underlying anger at Rishi’s handling of the campaign and his extraordinary decision to call the election now. Speaking to several candidates the other day about how the campaign was going, there was a mixture between all of us of white hot anger and just sheer despondency.
The reason that the odds were quite good on the prospect of an early election – on which some of my senior colleagues were foolishly betting – is because most people who knew anything about politics thought it would be a bad decision. That has been proven to be the case.
We ended up having a debate and by the end, it seemed probable that he would ultimately vote for me. But he wanted to show me how annoyed he was with the Conservatives nationally – particularly that we haven’t done enough to bring down levels of immigration. It’s difficult to blame him and there are many more like him. It’s an impossible task for us to win them all round before polling day.
Yesterday, when I asked another constituent whether they were voting for me, he replied: “Just about.” He said his “report card” that he wants me to communicate to Rishi Sunak is: “Must do better”.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of this election, though, is that we can no longer be confident that party members will vote Conservative. In several cases, what I thought would be a brief conversation asking a member to put a poster up has ended up being a 10-15-minute conversation trying to persuade them to vote for me.
One of the lower profile scandals that has really damaged us among the grassroots is the parachuting of favoured people like Richard Holden, the party chairman, into what No 10 would have considered safe seats. In fact, his behaviour has demotivated activists and also essentially stripped the party of a chairman during a general election campaign.
The party chairman should be the key attack dog during a campaign like this, on the airwaves all the time. But, since an initial car-crash interview on Sky after he was installed as candidate for Basildon and Billericay, he’s hardly been seen.
Now I’ve heard that senior figures on the Left of the party are floating the idea of rank-and-file members being blocked from having a vote in the inevitable leadership contest that will follow next week’s result. Surely that cannot be true. There really would be a civil war in the party if that happened.
That's all I am saying on the subject.
FWIW when I went to private school (a minor one) lots of my peers were the scions of minor local businessmen. Sons of doctors, corner shop owners, the local lawyers' son etc. Even just a decade latter they've been priced out - fees at my school have doubled in that time.
I can't for the life of me work out why. £10-15kpa is the sweet spot to scoop up lots of people in the £60-80k bracket, but the entire market has ran away from them, and with it public sympathy.
FWIW I also deal with a lot of legacies, and we're having fun issues with whether school fees really are gifts out of surplus income now the fees are so large. So even that route (grandparents sell a house they bought for £3.50 in the 70s for £4.5m), reinvest and pay the school fees of the grandchildren is under threat.
So @Nigel_Farage has decided to simply ignore this.
Leslie Lilley remains a Reform party candidate and no action has been taken.
Reform are happy to have a man in their ranks who says:
He would "slaughter migrants then have their family taken out"
Please don't let this pass.
https://x.com/Otto_English/status/1806372623435370733
What you're talking about is some kind of clever gotcha, what I'm talking about is actually knowing and being friends with trans people in real life, who are kind, and sweet, and just want to be left alone.
FWIW, most trans people consider WPATH to be actually *hostile* to them by medicalising their condition, much as homosexuality has been medicalised in the past. But you wouldn't know that. Because you've never sat down and had a cup of coffee with a trans person - mtf or ftm - and just chatted to them about life.
If you could actually do that, you'd realise they're much the same as you and I, and just as autonomous, and just as capable of making up their own minds about how they want to live their lives.
I could spend the next x hours arguing this with you, or sending you links to stuff that shows how trans teen suicides rose after availability of healthcare services were cut. But I'm not here to debate that.
Trans people are lovely and kind. They are also assholes, and ignorant. They are happy and sad, they are artists and designers, they are economists and business owners - they are just human beings like the rest of us. I know this, because I count several as my friends.
If you want to keep on banging the drum you want to keep banging, that's your choice. But I highly suggest you just sit down and talk with a couple of the people whose lives you're actually talking about, before you judge them.
"The only winner tonight is the Voyager probe speeding away from Earth at 17km/sec."
Being a man of innocent virtues, I was shocked by their stories.
The treatment of confused children has been a scandal and is now being exposed.
Sounds like we agree on WPATH?
TBH I think it's the most straightforward and genuine thing I have seen from him all campaign.
Stop and think about you're own perception. Unless there's something really profound about you you're not telling us, your perception is of a single timeline, a single universe. If Many Worlds is true, that means the "you" that is perceiving is the result of many divergent choices. There are infinite parallel "you"s in these other worlds. So if you predict that the next 20 coin tosses with all be heads, and then flip a coin 20 times, you'll almost certainly end up in a universe where it didn't happen. There a little less than a one in a million chance you get your coin tosses. You won't experience the twenty heads in a row, even though it "happened".
So in a navel gazing way, any prediction is inevitable, but also the NEGATION of that same prediction is also inevitable. You can think of inevitability in that way if you like, but you're then talking a different, technical, language that normal people in normal conversation don't.
The same is true of determinism though they are much stickier arguments to have. In the end they all boil down to the same thing: the denial of what is clearly available to all of us all the time. Nobody acts like determinism is true. You can pretend it makes sense on some level, but that's just the same same game as the coin toss scenario. The only thing you can convince people of if you pretend that they don't really have any choice is that philosophers can be the biggest pains in the arse.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he would preside over the U.S. Senate debate surrounding disputes of the 2020 election results if Vice President Mike Pence does not show up.
He suggested Pence was not expected to attend but Grassley’s staff later said that was a “misinterpretation” and that Pence was expected to be there.
On Wednesday, Congress will meet to formally count the Electoral College votes after they were certified by states last month. At least 12 GOP senators and dozens of House Republicans say they intend to object to the Electoral College results as those votes are read, state by state, in a joint session that begins at noon CT Wednesday.
During an exchange with reporters on Tuesday, Grassley was asked how he plans to vote.
“Well, first of all, I will be — if the Vice President isn’t there and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” according to a transcript of his remarks sent by a spokesperson.
Grassley serves as the president pro tempore of the Senate and will preside over any portion of the debate that Pence does not attend. But Grassley expects Pence to be present on Wednesday, according to his spokesperson.
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2021/01/05/grassley-suggests-he-may-preside-over-senate-debate-on-electoral-college-votes/
Interesting that there were suggestions beforehand that Pence might not show up.
80% of every room can agree on 99% of how trans people live. Every trans person I know just wants to live their life without getting abused.
It's the maximalists that insist that single sex-rape centres are unreasonable, or that male women shouldn't be allowed to use the womens' loo, or sport should be a free for all that poison the well for everyone.
These normally consist of text or illustrations, bound in a cover stiffer than their pages. They may be printed in any language or characters (including Braille or shorthand), photocopied, typed or hand-written, so long as they are found in book or booklet form.
Supplies of any of the following are zero-rated:
literary works
reference books
directories and catalogues
antique books
collections of letters or documents permanently bound in covers
loose-leaf books, manuals or instructions, whether complete with their binder or not
amendments to zero-rated loose-leaf books, even if issued separately
School work books and other educational texts in question and answer format, are zero-rated because the spaces provided for the insertion of answers are incidental to the essential character of the book or booklet. The same applies to exam papers in question and answer format provided they qualify as books, booklets, brochures, pamphlets or leaflets.
But supplies of the following are standard-rated:
books of plans or drawings for industrial, architectural, engineering, commercial or similar purposes
picture card and stamp albums, unless they contain a substantial amount of reading matter which is complete in itself, and no more than 25% of the album is set aside for the mounting of cards and stamps
completed stamp albums
products that are essentially stationery items, for example, diaries and address books
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/zero-rating-books-and-printed-matter-for-vat-notice-70110
As far as confused children go, if you're ever in London I could ask a couple of people to talk to you, say, a trans friend who's mtf who knew at age 12 who is my age and transitioned in their teens. Or a ftm who transitioned in their 30s but wishes the tools and resources had been available to them to come out when they were a teenager.
Gentleness is a virtue, and the trans people I know tend to say "I knew from much younger, I wish I could have done it sooner, but I was afraid to come out because of all the hatred I'd get".
Be kind. That's all I can say. That's all there is worth saying in this world, at the end of the day.
https://x.com/hendopolis/status/1806785690174206446/photo/1
Stop the Starmageddon etc etc.
https://archive.ph/EI3PC
TSE? MarqueeMark? BigG? Probably more I've forgot.
Plenty of Tories will never vote for Farage.
Page 1 Vote Tory
Page 2 Please vote Tory
Page 3 PLEASE vote Tory!
...
As someone who's probably* voting LibDem on Thursday I want to believe. But we are putting a lot of trust in what is basically Martin Baxter's opinion.
I am not optimistic on LibDem gains on Thursday. I suspect the outer Blue Wall is basically going to be 40-35-25 (take off a few % for Reform but that'll be the share between the big three). The LibDems will end up with 35-40 seats - which, let's be fair, is a massive improvement on 12. But becoming the official opposition is hat-eating territory.
* Turns out the independent socialist in our constituency is really good! I'm almost tempted to vote for her as a "screw you" to the absolutely appalling apparatchik who's guaranteed to get in as Labour candidate.
DYOR etc etc.
Course, I couldn't help it. It was my genes and my atoms and the bad tummy I've got from last night's curry.
As somebody once put it, I wind up racists by existing.
Every time you hear - Muslims don't integrate, Muslims have no understanding of British history etc then they have to deal with me.
While an exercise book with spaces to be written in is a book as its not.
My mistake. Though interesting that educational materials are explicitly mentioned.
The argument that the right to an education = the right of the right sort to go to Eton will delight the judges of the ECHR.