Incidentally I note the Archbishop of York is under pressure now too (although if that standard was applied consistently a number of former Ofsted chiefs would not rest easily).
I was trying to work out what would happen in the event of a vacancy in both Canterbury and York. That’s not happened since the 1650s and never, as far as I know, while the hierarchy was functioning.
I presume either the Bishop of London - who is also under pressure - would be asked to take charge, or the Bench of Bishops would elect one of their number to carry out the functions of the office of Archbishop until an appointment is made.
If the latter, that has interesting betting implications depending on who they choose. Whoever it is might suddenly become favourite to be archbishop especially if, as seems possible, they picked Martyn Snow.
The situation in York province is complicated by the vacancies of Durham and Carlisle. I imagine Nick Baines as the longest serving Bishop would have to step up.
If it were the case that he did everything he could for reasons of law, and had done everything he could to keep the offender from anything that looked like preferment, then I would reluctantly support him remaining in post.
But I don't believe - listening to the programme - that that is the case. He had the moral authority and responsibility to intervene, for example by withdrawing the offender's permission to officiate (PTO) in his Diocese. He did not take action.
Therefore imo ++York needs to stand down.
Although if the individual had been through due process and the church authorities had decided on a punishment (I don’t know the specifics of this case) then how is it just for ++York to apply an extra punishment
If a small charity allowed someone who is a previous safeguarding risk into a safeguarding covered role, they would have a bridge dropped on them. Rightly. This has happened.
It is quite simple. Why should different rules apply?
Though of course they do. Look at the large charities and the behaviour of staff in developing countries…
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
It's quite incredible that North Korea has now invaded Europe.
And Europe's reaction is a mere shoulder-shrug and "meh!"
(And yes, I think 'invasion' is the correct word, given the reported number of troops, and the fact they're officially sanctioned by the NK government.)
Wait until you hear about the time Europe, including the UK, invaded North Korea.
To be fair, I don't think they shrugged their shoulders and went "meh" on that occasion, though.
Douglas McArthur was an advocate of sunshine on the matter. Buckets of it….
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
To make it work, you need to make the south much poorer. No government will do that.
Badenoch is right, a merger between Tories and Reform would not necessarily help the right overall as some voters now voting Tory would go LD and a handful Labour even if a plurality would still back Farage's party as their second choice. It is also very unlikely to happen unless Canada style Reform overtook the Tories on votes and seats under FPTP, under PR the Tories could likely stay a seperate party even then.
Indeed any deal would be more likely to occur after a general election if the Tories and Reform combined have enough seats for a majority but seperately neither does. Hence in Italy centre right Forza Italia are now in government with populist right Brothers of Italy of PM Meloni and Lega and in Spain the centre right PP and populist right Vox will form an alliance for government if they win the next election and in New Zealand the centre right Nationals of PM Luxon lead a government including populist right New Zealand First and the libertarian ACT both of which have similar policies on immigration and the economy to Reform here
I disagree with the consensus. Yes if the parties merged today and there was an election tomorrow it would play out as per the header and posters.
But over time, as we have seen with the Republicans in the US, voters can come round to positions they themselves would have seen as absurd, and not "them", a decade earlier.
That works if Reform merge into the Tories but Farage isn't going to do that.
Why not? It has been his stated and long term ambition for over a decade. Of course he will, if the time and circumstance is right.
Agree: Amongst the solid tips (Laying Farage not to be PM) I can sense the general direction of the broad right of UK politics heading toward Reform/changing the Tories to a more Reform like direction which seems to be being dismissed (tepid analysis pace Dura-Ace) here..
I’m happy to be laying Farage as next PM but if there was a market on if Farage was to ever be PM I wouldn’t be laying him.
Well then the issue becomes "if so, then when?". He is already 60 and we have a clear 5 year Parliament ahead.
The oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Palmerston who was aged 70, but who had been a key figure in Parliament and government for several decades before. The oldest PM ever was Gladstone who was 84 when he retired at the end of his fourth term.
So, if you decide to back Farage becoming PM "sometime", you need to ask yourself a) how long Farage will live in health and strength and b) how long it would take RefUk to become a party of government that would allow Farage to be PM. While obviously "Farage next PM" is a clear lay, I think "Farage PM sometime" is also probably a lay, just at much lower prices. Father Time may be a bigger enemy than Kemi here.
Reform currently have 5 seats in the House of Commons.
Isn't the major difference between the two bets the possibility of turmoil in the Labour Party shortly before the 2029 election? If the polling in late 2028 suggests Labour will be reduced to a rump and the Faragists will win the day, I would have thought it's not unlikely (~50% chance in this scenario?) Labour dump Starmer and try to do a reboot with a 'fresh' face. That would make Farage next PM a loser, even if he wins the 2029 election.
It's quite incredible that North Korea has now invaded Europe.
And Europe's reaction is a mere shoulder-shrug and "meh!"
(And yes, I think 'invasion' is the correct word, given the reported number of troops, and the fact they're officially sanctioned by the NK government.)
Wait until you hear about the time Europe, including the UK, invaded North Korea.
To be fair, I don't think they shrugged their shoulders and went "meh" on that occasion, though.
Douglas McArthur was an advocate of sunshine on the matter. Buckets of it….
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
The era of PMs lasting a whole parliament, let alone a decade, is well and truly over.
Labour will need to get very ruthless, very quickly, if they want to hold on to power.
I expect Labour are surprised at just how ferocious things have been from day one, but I'd imagine they're not too worried quite yet.
If asylum cases are being dealt with, immigration is down, waiting lists drop, energy bills come down, and houses get built, then they'll be in pole position next election. Whether it happens, we'll find out, (and it may rely on no huge shocks elsewhere in the World), but all those things will take years to happen, so it'll be some time before we can genuinely judge.
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
To make it work, you need to make the south much poorer. No government will do that.
The economy-is-a-pizza theory, as I live!
The economic theory behind “levelling up” is that the underutilised resources of the area can be bought into activity. Which offers more and faster growth - from a lower level - enabling that area to begin to catch up.
Incidentally I note the Archbishop of York is under pressure now too (although if that standard was applied consistently a number of former Ofsted chiefs would not rest easily).
I was trying to work out what would happen in the event of a vacancy in both Canterbury and York. That’s not happened since the 1650s and never, as far as I know, while the hierarchy was functioning.
I presume either the Bishop of London - who is also under pressure - would be asked to take charge, or the Bench of Bishops would elect one of their number to carry out the functions of the office of Archbishop until an appointment is made.
If the latter, that has interesting betting implications depending on who they choose. Whoever it is might suddenly become favourite to be archbishop especially if, as seems possible, they picked Martyn Snow.
The situation in York province is complicated by the vacancies of Durham and Carlisle. I imagine Nick Baines as the longest serving Bishop would have to step up.
If it were the case that he did everything he could for reasons of law, and had done everything he could to keep the offender from anything that looked like preferment, then I would reluctantly support him remaining in post.
But I don't believe - listening to the programme - that that is the case. He had the moral authority and responsibility to intervene, for example by withdrawing the offender's permission to officiate (PTO) in his Diocese. He did not take action.
Therefore imo ++York needs to stand down.
I have no views - don't know enough - on the Cottrell/Tudor thing. However, a bishop can only act in ways that are lawful. So, for example a permission to officiate could not be removed because there wasn't one in the first place. Tudor was an office holder continuously from 1997-2024. He could only be removed under the Discipline Measure, which in the end he was, having been suspended from office since 2019.
The recent judgment of the Tribunal (a public document), useful for some chronology and facts is here:
Agree, Tudor was initially found not guilty in a criminal court in 1988 of sexual offences and then let off on a technicality after a second criminal trial. Nonetheless he was convicted of sexual offences by a C of E tribunal in 1989 and barred from the clergy profession but then for some reason restored as a minister a number of years later before finally being struck off again in October. Why he was restored by the tribunal is more the issue, Cottrell simply followed their lead
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
There is, if the Tory shire seats and Reform redwall seats combined give a majority.
The simple fact is a lot of the redwall seats which were Labour until 2019 would only ever vote Conservative under Boris, they won't vote for any other Tory but they might vote for Farage.
The Tories are better off focusing on the seats Cameron and May won which are actually comfortably over 200 seats and indeed closer to 300 seats (albeit the bluewall Remain seats are sadly lost to the LDs post Brexit for the time being unfortunately)
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
There's been a shift in the type of unbalancing.
Previously - enough jobs in southern England, not enough jobs elsewhere.
Currently - unaffordable housing in southern England, affordable housing elsewhere.
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
Trouble is that, without making a serious dent in those Lib Dem seats in Nice England, even a 1983 style landslide barely gets them over the line.
I don't think the Conservatives have ever faced a meaningful challenge to both their right and their left before. It's blooming hard to solve that one. It might take Farage being wheeled off to a Home first.
What's still missing from Badenoch's comments is any sense of why the Conservatives oppose Reform, beyond the electoral dynamics.
What are the proposals of Reform that are bad policies that should be opposed by good Conservatives? Until they can come up with a few examples, the battle on the right is going to continue to be rather one-sided.
Trying to box Reform in as a bargain basement version of the Conservatives for bargain basement places isn't going to work.
Tories back NHS with more use of private sector and private health, Reform want a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system the main differences.
On topic, parties are coalitions, obviously - particularly under FPTP. The Tory and Reform coalitions overlap, but much of that overlap has already migrated, and there's a significant portion of both parties outside of that overlap.
Those that haven't yet made the jump, but might (eg Casino or Leon, to pick a couple of random examples) might well be enough to win a majority under FPTP - though very probably not a majority of the vote.
De facto merger via defection to Reform is perhaps more likely than an actual merger ? And might actually work to Reform's advantage as the rump Tories waste their vote on an emasculated party, rather than lending it to Reform's actual competition.
I think we need to remember that the Tory membership is highly congruent with Reform, but the remaining voters are not, and neither are the Tory MPs.
It's quite likely that the Tory membership will want a pact/merger with Reform, thereby putting off the voters, while the Tory MPs oppose Reform, thereby the party falls between stools.
Not entirely true, otherwise Tory members would have voted for Jenrick not Kemi.
The most hard right Tory members and councillors and indeed voters are now in Reform anyway
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
To make it work, you need to make the south much poorer. No government will do that.
The economy-is-a-pizza theory, as I live!
The economic theory behind “levelling up” is that the underutilised resources of the area can be bought into activity. Which offers more and faster growth - from a lower level - enabling that area to begin to catch up.
Hmm. You can definitely get "catch up" at the country level (places such as Japan post WW2, China more recently, etc, clearly show that). But at the within-country level I'm less certain. If you're a Chinese person thinking about setting up a factory or contemplating switching from an agricultural job to a factory job, obviously you're going to do it in China because "move to the US and then do it" is much trickier. But if you're in the north east of the UK and thinking about a career change or a spot of entrepreneurship then there are rather fewer barriers to moving to your local economic hotspot to do it.
Do we have good examples of where this has worked (UK or elsewhere)? Maybe I'm just unaware of the models we could be following.
It's quite incredible that North Korea has now invaded Europe.
And Europe's reaction is a mere shoulder-shrug and "meh!"
(And yes, I think 'invasion' is the correct word, given the reported number of troops, and the fact they're officially sanctioned by the NK government.)
Wait until you hear about the time Europe, including the UK, invaded North Korea.
It was however Seoul-ly in response to Kim's aggression.
Admittedly that twat MacArthur then got a bit carried away.
Ukraine is also an independent sovereign state of some three decades standing.
North and South Korea were - de jure, if not de facto - part of the same nation, with governments in the north and south both claiming sovereignty, up until the Panmunjom settlement.
Russia invaded Ukraine; Korea was a civil war, where the great powers took sides.
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
The Tories can win without the red wall, but they need a message that resonates with a number of people they’ve pushed away from in recent years. Essentially, the professional classes, business owners, entrepreneurial folk, and strivers. But that isn’t an easy way back and it requires them to reconcile themselves, I would suggest, with a slightly more economically coherent and less purist Brexit vision which they show little signs of wanting to face up to.
It’s why the Tories are in such a mess. It’s very hard to reconcile their coalition. Labour have a similar problem on the left but they are also squatting on much of the centre ground so they’re getting away with it better, for now.
In the meantime you have a whole host of voters who are fed up with Labour, fed up with the Tories and are ready to vote for AN Other in the shape of Farage. Getting those voters back is hard. Both parties have made it even harder for themselves with their actions over the years.
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
There is, if the Tory shire seats and Reform redwall seats combined give a majority.
The simple fact is a lot of the redwall seats which were Labour until 2019 would only ever vote Conservative under Boris, they won't vote for any other Tory but they might vote for Farage.
The Tories are better off focusing on the seats Cameron and May won which are actually comfortably over 200 seats and indeed closer to 300 seats (albeit the bluewall Remain seats are sadly lost to the LDs post Brexit for the time being unfortunately)
Yet again you make the fundamental mistake in assuming a Conservative MP and a Reform MP are interchangeable.
And also again are ignoring that the electoral world has changed since 2010.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
To make it work, you need to make the south much poorer. No government will do that.
The economy-is-a-pizza theory, as I live!
The economic theory behind “levelling up” is that the underutilised resources of the area can be bought into activity. Which offers more and faster growth - from a lower level - enabling that area to begin to catch up.
Hmm. You can definitely get "catch up" at the country level (places such as Japan post WW2, China more recently, etc, clearly show that). But at the within-country level I'm less certain. If you're a Chinese person thinking about setting up a factory or contemplating switching from an agricultural job to a factory job, obviously you're going to do it in China because "move to the US and then do it" is much trickier. But if you're in the north east of the UK and thinking about a career change or a spot of entrepreneurship then there are rather fewer barriers to moving to your local economic hotspot to do it.
Do we have good examples of where this has worked (UK or elsewhere)? Maybe I'm just unaware of the models we could be following.
Interesting interview and apparently the government have been sounding him out for advice. Rather amusingly, his core criticism is exactly what Big Dom banged on about.
I've not watched the whole hour-long video yet but right from the start, the first thing mentioned is Britain's terrible regional inequality. The government needs to prioritise development around the country rather than bulldozing London's green belt.
Yes, I think a demand-driven housebuilding programme will further entrench those inequalities as they have in Scotland.
The west-east shift, with areas around Glasgow depopulating and massive growth around Edinburgh, is demand driven. That demand exists because there is a critical mass of businesses and young people, and a thriving economy. It starts to snowball, so we now have even high house prices here than we did before.
England desperately needs 1) a plan for towns and 2) a plan for the NE to stop London soaking up all the growth.
Like what? If there was an obvious way to produce more growth in areas of the country that are underperforming then some government since the 1980s would have done it already. It's clear that massive regional inequality is a bad thing, and we definitely shouldn't be investing in London exclusively and starving Manchester of resources, for example. But where an area does not already have a critical mass of business and economic activity I find it hard to see that government activity can create one. Answers on a postcard, but in the meantime I think providing enough housing to the areas that *are* at critical mass that we don't constrict them is better than doing nothing and hoping that growth will thus somehow happen elsewhere instead.
There are ways the gov could help if it actually wanted to change things.
One obvious one is to tilt the planning playing field, particularly for industry. Make it really cheap/easy to build industrial buildings in deprived areas, and people looking to build or expand businesses are more likely to move there, and existing businesses will find it easier to compete.
Another (really cheap) one would be for the government to provide finance for business equipment purchases. Give the people who finance things like CNC machine tools a pile of money to lend out, charged to them at 0%. They have to take the credit risk from the customer (for which they will be allowed to charge) so the gov doesn't get legged up with a load of bad debt. Result - loads of small businesses expanding on the back of finance costing 1-2% rather than 7-8%. Target it by postcode if you want to use this to power leveling up.
Much more expensive but very effective - my local council ran some really good leveling up grants with their leveling up cash - you could get 80% of a spend up to £10k, 50% of a spend up to £20k, 20% of a spend up to £100k. Mate of mine combined his £50k bounceback loan and one of these grants to buy his first modern £75k CNC milling machine with minimal external finance. He's now running a machine shop with 4 modern CNC machines and targeting £500k annual turnover. If every council had used their leveling up funds this well, it would have made a massive difference, unfortunately most of them utterly wasted it instead (usually on doomed attempts to prop up dead high streets).
Government refuses to say if next year's local council elections will go ahead
@NickFerrariLBC asks if the 2025 elections for 21 local councils & 10 unitary authorities will go ahead
Local govt Minister Jim McMahon refuses to say
"There will be full consultation"
In a way it is nice that the government has shown some interest in local government to the point it is pushing ahead quickly with its expansion of strategic mayoral authorities and the like, but it still looks like a big old mess to me, and there are far bigger problems facing local government financing around social care and SEND to worry about, rather than the flashy, but less meaningful, and entirely arbitrary agglomeration of county areas into another bloody layer of political administration.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
It wouldn't have happened even if there were detailed plans as Covid spending blew up any opportunity to fix other problems. We didn't even get any breathing room after the pandemic ended thanks to Putin's war in Ukraine which sent energy prices through the roof and the government ending up spending tens of billions to support the economy. Starmer's plans are likewise going to be facing an uphill battle as Trump is likely to do a lot of damage to trade, and perhaps force our hand on defence spending.
If we are lucky maybe in the 2030s we might get a chance to fix some decades old problems.
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
There is, if the Tory shire seats and Reform redwall seats combined give a majority.
The simple fact is a lot of the redwall seats which were Labour until 2019 would only ever vote Conservative under Boris, they won't vote for any other Tory but they might vote for Farage.
The Tories are better off focusing on the seats Cameron and May won which are actually comfortably over 200 seats and indeed closer to 300 seats (albeit the bluewall Remain seats are sadly lost to the LDs post Brexit for the time being unfortunately)
Yet again you make the fundamental mistake in assuming a Conservative MP and a Reform MP are interchangeable.
Farage has spent decades explicitly targeting the Tory party, yet for many Tories he is still their ideal leader, and accomodation better than fighting. It's quite odd really.
I disagree with the consensus. Yes if the parties merged today and there was an election tomorrow it would play out as per the header and posters.
But over time, as we have seen with the Republicans in the US, voters can come round to positions they themselves would have seen as absurd, and not "them", a decade earlier.
That works if Reform merge into the Tories but Farage isn't going to do that.
Why not? It has been his stated and long term ambition for over a decade. Of course he will, if the time and circumstance is right.
Agree: Amongst the solid tips (Laying Farage not to be PM) I can sense the general direction of the broad right of UK politics heading toward Reform/changing the Tories to a more Reform like direction which seems to be being dismissed (tepid analysis pace Dura-Ace) here..
I’m happy to be laying Farage as next PM but if there was a market on if Farage was to ever be PM I wouldn’t be laying him.
Well then the issue becomes "if so, then when?". He is already 60 and we have a clear 5 year Parliament ahead.
The oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Palmerston who was aged 70, but who had been a key figure in Parliament and government for several decades before. The oldest PM ever was Gladstone who was 84 when he retired at the end of his fourth term.
So, if you decide to back Farage becoming PM "sometime", you need to ask yourself a) how long Farage will live in health and strength and b) how long it would take RefUk to become a party of government that would allow Farage to be PM. While obviously "Farage next PM" is a clear lay, I think "Farage PM sometime" is also probably a lay, just at much lower prices. Father Time may be a bigger enemy than Kemi here.
Reform currently have 5 seats in the House of Commons.
This feels like Trump's going to jail/Putin's got cancer level analysis.
Well its not impossible impossible, just not very likely: how do you get from 5 seats and 14% of the vote to the kind of support that gets Farage into Number Ten in a time line where Farage is still young enough to do the job?
Even if you think Labour falls apart, for which the only evidence is the more hysterical right wing commentary, there is still plenty of competition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. We cannot now expect at GE before, say, 2029, when Farage will be 65. The odds of Farage being able to take power then are not great- he has strong personal negatives and his signature policy of Brexit is not popular these days either. But even supposing RefUk make a strong advance at the next GE, to get from 5 seats to the needed 326 seats is so unprecedented that it has to involve the total collapse of both Labour and the Tories at the same time. Again maybe the fash-curious here could see it happen, but I honestly just don´t see how. But, say, RefUk get 250 gains- more than the 211 record gain Labour just made- do the other parties just roll over and say "on you go Nige"? Again not impossible impossible, just not very likely. Farage would have to wait out another Parliament. Then he´d have to advance again at any subsequent GE. Even if the Parliament does not go full term, we are still talking potentially quite long periods of time- even in the absolute best case he is late sixties by the third GE, and again he´d have to have another historic GE result to even get close to being PM.
So I stand by laying "Farage as PM sometime" because it requires historic changes in support, the simultaneous collapse of both Labour and the Tories and the elimination of the personal and policy negatives for RefUk and all the time the clock is ticking on Farage´s age and health.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
It wouldn't have happened even if there were detailed plans as Covid spending blew up any opportunity to fix other problems. We didn't even get any breathing room after the pandemic ended thanks to Putin's war in Ukraine which sent energy prices through the roof and the government ending up spending tens of billions to support the economy. Starmer's plans are likewise going to be facing an uphill battle as Trump is likely to do a lot of damage to trade, and perhaps force our hand on defence spending.
If we are lucky maybe in the 2030s we might get a chance to fix some decades old problems.
What an optimist you are.
We don't have any will to fix our decades old problems anyway, and if we can manage to plod along with things only getting moderately worse year on year, we never will ahve the will, because that's easier.
It's a rumour around how quickly the government will want to move ahead with the next tranche of combined authority mayors, and if that is to include councils up for election this year, in which case perhaps they might be delayed to coincide with introduction of a new mayoral system in those areas.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
Edit - I assume that's the basis of the rumour anywhere, that is how I came across the idea, so if there's another reason behind the idea I have no clue.
It's a rumour around how quickly the government will want to move ahead with the next tranche of combined authority mayors, and if that is to include councils up for election this year, in which case perhaps they might be delayed to coincide with introduction of a new mayoral system in those areas.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
The Tories can win without the red wall, but they need a message that resonates with a number of people they’ve pushed away from in recent years. Essentially, the professional classes, business owners, entrepreneurial folk, and strivers. But that isn’t an easy way back and it requires them to reconcile themselves, I would suggest, with a slightly more economically coherent and less purist Brexit vision which they show little signs of wanting to face up to.
It’s why the Tories are in such a mess. It’s very hard to reconcile their coalition. Labour have a similar problem on the left but they are also squatting on much of the centre ground so they’re getting away with it better, for now.
In the meantime you have a whole host of voters who are fed up with Labour, fed up with the Tories and are ready to vote for AN Other in the shape of Farage. Getting those voters back is hard. Both parties have made it even harder for themselves with their actions over the years.
The Conservatives cannot win a majority without the gains they made in 2019.
They need to gain 200 seats from their present position and they have no chance in many of those lost to the LibDems.
Which means that the likes of Redcar and Scunthorpe have to be won by the Conservatives to gain a majority.
In fact its likely that the Conservatives will need to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe just to have the most MPs.
The electoral geography of England has changed -- for every Wycombe (Conservative in 1997 but now likely lost permanently) they have to make a gain somewhere which was Labour in 2010.
“Levelling up” didn’t happen because like everything Johnson did, it was a slogan not a policy.
It wouldn't have happened even if there were detailed plans as Covid spending blew up any opportunity to fix other problems. We didn't even get any breathing room after the pandemic ended thanks to Putin's war in Ukraine which sent energy prices through the roof and the government ending up spending tens of billions to support the economy. Starmer's plans are likewise going to be facing an uphill battle as Trump is likely to do a lot of damage to trade, and perhaps force our hand on defence spending.
If we are lucky maybe in the 2030s we might get a chance to fix some decades old problems.
The government’s hand might be forced long before then if the Trump presidency does play hardball on trade and defence.
The government may have to confront the elephant in the room that has been waiting for all western governments (certainly in Europe) for some time. There isn’t going to be as much money to do as much things as the government currently does, or certainly in the areas is currently prioritises. How do we fix that problem, and who are the winners and losers from it. None of the solutions to the problem are, to the current political classes, in any way palatable. Yet decisions must be made eventually.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Yep. I always felt it was a lot of rhetoric with a side order of pork barrel bribes seats in Northern towns with sitting Tory MPs (e.g. plan for towns).
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
I can imagine the idea was driven with sincerity, but that ambition and focus quickly gave way and rhetoric and pork barrellism took over as that is just plain easier to do, and easier to fool ourselves (and others) that that would address wider problems.
What's still missing from Badenoch's comments is any sense of why the Conservatives oppose Reform, beyond the electoral dynamics.
What are the proposals of Reform that are bad policies that should be opposed by good Conservatives? Until they can come up with a few examples, the battle on the right is going to continue to be rather one-sided.
Trying to box Reform in as a bargain basement version of the Conservatives for bargain basement places isn't going to work.
Tories back NHS with more use of private sector and private health, Reform want a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system the main differences.
I'd be curious to know how many Reform voters want "a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system".
I do agree with the header to a great extent though. It was also reflected in lots of polling around election time, which suggested Reform voters were similarly split, with at least as many likely to go to Lab/Lib/Green as to the Tories.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
I disagree with the consensus. Yes if the parties merged today and there was an election tomorrow it would play out as per the header and posters.
But over time, as we have seen with the Republicans in the US, voters can come round to positions they themselves would have seen as absurd, and not "them", a decade earlier.
That works if Reform merge into the Tories but Farage isn't going to do that.
Why not? It has been his stated and long term ambition for over a decade. Of course he will, if the time and circumstance is right.
Agree: Amongst the solid tips (Laying Farage not to be PM) I can sense the general direction of the broad right of UK politics heading toward Reform/changing the Tories to a more Reform like direction which seems to be being dismissed (tepid analysis pace Dura-Ace) here..
I’m happy to be laying Farage as next PM but if there was a market on if Farage was to ever be PM I wouldn’t be laying him.
Well then the issue becomes "if so, then when?". He is already 60 and we have a clear 5 year Parliament ahead.
The oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Palmerston who was aged 70, but who had been a key figure in Parliament and government for several decades before. The oldest PM ever was Gladstone who was 84 when he retired at the end of his fourth term.
So, if you decide to back Farage becoming PM "sometime", you need to ask yourself a) how long Farage will live in health and strength and b) how long it would take RefUk to become a party of government that would allow Farage to be PM. While obviously "Farage next PM" is a clear lay, I think "Farage PM sometime" is also probably a lay, just at much lower prices. Father Time may be a bigger enemy than Kemi here.
Reform currently have 5 seats in the House of Commons.
This feels like Trump's going to jail/Putin's got cancer level analysis.
Well its not impossible impossible, just not very likely: how do you get from 5 seats and 14% of the vote to the kind of support that gets Farage into Number Ten in a time line where Farage is still young enough to do the job?
Even if you think Labour falls apart, for which the only evidence is the more hysterical right wing commentary, there is still plenty of competition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. We cannot now expect at GE before, say, 2029, when Farage will be 65. The odds of Farage being able to take power then are not great- he has strong personal negatives and his signature policy of Brexit is not popular these days either. But even supposing RefUk make a strong advance at the next GE, to get from 5 seats to the needed 326 seats is so unprecedented that it has to involve the total collapse of both Labour and the Tories at the same time. Again maybe the fash-curious here could see it happen, but I honestly just don´t see how. But, say, RefUk get 250 gains- more than the 211 record gain Labour just made- do the other parties just roll over and say "on you go Nige"? Again not impossible impossible, just not very likely. Farage would have to wait out another Parliament. Then he´d have to advance again at any subsequent GE. Even if the Parliament does not go full term, we are still talking potentially quite long periods of time- even in the absolute best case he is late sixties by the third GE, and again he´d have to have another historic GE result to even get close to being PM.
So I stand by laying "Farage as PM sometime" because it requires historic changes in support, the simultaneous collapse of both Labour and the Tories and the elimination of the personal and policy negatives for RefUk and all the time the clock is ticking on Farage´s age and health.
Good morning ladies, gentlemen etc. Better morning again here, with some sunshine. On topic Farage is up there with Galloway as one of the last people I'd want to see PM, but to be fair to him, Churchill was 66 in 1940. So being in his mid-sixties would not really be a bar. In any event plenty of 19th Century statesmen held high off ice their 70's. Of course it might be academic as far as I'm concerned; I'll be in my early 90's in 2029!
What's still missing from Badenoch's comments is any sense of why the Conservatives oppose Reform, beyond the electoral dynamics.
What are the proposals of Reform that are bad policies that should be opposed by good Conservatives? Until they can come up with a few examples, the battle on the right is going to continue to be rather one-sided.
Trying to box Reform in as a bargain basement version of the Conservatives for bargain basement places isn't going to work.
Tories back NHS with more use of private sector and private health, Reform want a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system the main differences.
I'd be curious to know how many Reform voters want "a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system".
I do agree with the header to a great extent though. It was also reflected in lots of polling around election time, which suggested Reform voters were similarly split, with at least as many likely to go to Lab/Lib/Green as to the Tories.
The NHS is Reform’s biggest weakness at the moment. Expect Labour to try and exploit it. If Farage is smart he will be working to neutralise it as an issue.
It's a rumour around how quickly the government will want to move ahead with the next tranche of combined authority mayors, and if that is to include councils up for election this year, in which case perhaps they might be delayed to coincide with introduction of a new mayoral system in those areas.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
Edit - I assume that's the basis of the rumour anywhere, that is how I came across the idea, so if there's another reason behind the idea I have no clue.
There's talk of some pretty assertive reorganisation of councils- pushing really hard on making everywhere unitary (with Mayors atop that).
Excl: Government will move to scrap district councils in its devolution white paper on Monday, sparking the biggest local government reorganisation in 50 years
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
I don't imagine the combined forces of Reform and Conservative will have an overall majority in 2028/9, but if they do it would be the most hilarious coalition of chaos ever. The idea that Farage and his mates, in conjunction with the Tories, could form any sort of stable government is for the birds.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
It's a rumour around how quickly the government will want to move ahead with the next tranche of combined authority mayors, and if that is to include councils up for election this year, in which case perhaps they might be delayed to coincide with introduction of a new mayoral system in those areas.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
Edit - I assume that's the basis of the rumour anywhere, that is how I came across the idea, so if there's another reason behind the idea I have no clue.
There's talk of some pretty assertive reorganisation of councils- pushing really hard on making everywhere unitary (with Mayors atop that).
Excl: Government will move to scrap district councils in its devolution white paper on Monday, sparking the biggest local government reorganisation in 50 years
If a council is about to be abolished, there's some logic in not bothering with elections.
Though given how much trouble those elections are going to cause the Conservatives, and how little skin Labour have in this year of the cycle...
Abolition of the districts is a good idea, but frankly you'd probably want more than a year to get everything up together for any new unitaries (places like Surrey would need, IDK, 3-4), so a better option would seem to be shortening the terms from 2021, rather than pushing them back a year.
It's the strategic mayoral authorities I don't get and am very interested what the final details are, as pretty random combinations of 1.5-2m people seems to just be retaining a two tier approach just on a wider scale. Though there is at least talk of trying to make things more standardised for the new regional mayoralties in terms of powers etc, which is positive.
In terms of how much trouble the elections might be, my sense is the Conservatives are relatively optimistic about them...if Reform fail to organise well.
It's a rumour around how quickly the government will want to move ahead with the next tranche of combined authority mayors, and if that is to include councils up for election this year, in which case perhaps they might be delayed to coincide with introduction of a new mayoral system in those areas.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
Edit - I assume that's the basis of the rumour anywhere, that is how I came across the idea, so if there's another reason behind the idea I have no clue.
There's talk of some pretty assertive reorganisation of councils- pushing really hard on making everywhere unitary (with Mayors atop that).
Excl: Government will move to scrap district councils in its devolution white paper on Monday, sparking the biggest local government reorganisation in 50 years
I disagree with the consensus. Yes if the parties merged today and there was an election tomorrow it would play out as per the header and posters.
But over time, as we have seen with the Republicans in the US, voters can come round to positions they themselves would have seen as absurd, and not "them", a decade earlier.
That works if Reform merge into the Tories but Farage isn't going to do that.
Why not? It has been his stated and long term ambition for over a decade. Of course he will, if the time and circumstance is right.
Agree: Amongst the solid tips (Laying Farage not to be PM) I can sense the general direction of the broad right of UK politics heading toward Reform/changing the Tories to a more Reform like direction which seems to be being dismissed (tepid analysis pace Dura-Ace) here..
I’m happy to be laying Farage as next PM but if there was a market on if Farage was to ever be PM I wouldn’t be laying him.
Well then the issue becomes "if so, then when?". He is already 60 and we have a clear 5 year Parliament ahead.
The oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Palmerston who was aged 70, but who had been a key figure in Parliament and government for several decades before. The oldest PM ever was Gladstone who was 84 when he retired at the end of his fourth term.
So, if you decide to back Farage becoming PM "sometime", you need to ask yourself a) how long Farage will live in health and strength and b) how long it would take RefUk to become a party of government that would allow Farage to be PM. While obviously "Farage next PM" is a clear lay, I think "Farage PM sometime" is also probably a lay, just at much lower prices. Father Time may be a bigger enemy than Kemi here.
Reform currently have 5 seats in the House of Commons.
This feels like Trump's going to jail/Putin's got cancer level analysis.
Well its not impossible impossible, just not very likely: how do you get from 5 seats and 14% of the vote to the kind of support that gets Farage into Number Ten in a time line where Farage is still young enough to do the job?
Even if you think Labour falls apart, for which the only evidence is the more hysterical right wing commentary, there is still plenty of competition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. We cannot now expect at GE before, say, 2029, when Farage will be 65. The odds of Farage being able to take power then are not great- he has strong personal negatives and his signature policy of Brexit is not popular these days either. But even supposing RefUk make a strong advance at the next GE, to get from 5 seats to the needed 326 seats is so unprecedented that it has to involve the total collapse of both Labour and the Tories at the same time. Again maybe the fash-curious here could see it happen, but I honestly just don´t see how. But, say, RefUk get 250 gains- more than the 211 record gain Labour just made- do the other parties just roll over and say "on you go Nige"? Again not impossible impossible, just not very likely. Farage would have to wait out another Parliament. Then he´d have to advance again at any subsequent GE. Even if the Parliament does not go full term, we are still talking potentially quite long periods of time- even in the absolute best case he is late sixties by the third GE, and again he´d have to have another historic GE result to even get close to being PM.
So I stand by laying "Farage as PM sometime" because it requires historic changes in support, the simultaneous collapse of both Labour and the Tories and the elimination of the personal and policy negatives for RefUk and all the time the clock is ticking on Farage´s age and health.
I'm hopeless at judging peoples ages and Farage does look pretty fit to me, however when he was in the jungle my wife looked him up and was shocked by his age. She thought he looked old for someone who was then 59. I was 69 at the time and she thought I looked a lot younger. If he is a heavy smoker and drinker (I don't actually know if either are true or just part of his image). What will 5 years do to him?
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Parliament is sovereign which means he can’t say anything until he has stood up in Parliament and announced it.
I really don’t get why ministers go on the morning news round when they can’t say anything until later
I suppose the idea is if you send nobody the opposition sends people or the newspeople can set a narrative instead, but I don't think it really makes a difference when, as you say, they basically just say nothing, which only fuels speculation and leaves others to set a narrative anyway.
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
Redcliffe-Maud (which is probably pretty close to the council map we end up with) was over fifty years ago. The brute logic hasn't really changed since then.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
Since the last Labour government through the Coalition and the Tory governments that followed unitarisation has been moving forward, the Starmer government is just accelerating things alongisde its combined authority plans. People might say their district is good and the county bad, but it's not like its inevitable that is so across the country (nor even that unitaries will all be good at governing), but the cost savings are potentially enormous and with local government as it is it just makes sense.
Also, the idea people give two shits whether they have a unitary or a district/county is just crazy. You get some people suddenly interested in the subject when it happens, and even get some initial blowback, but most people really don't know what the structuring of their local governance is and will get used to it very quickly indeed, especially as day to day services don't really get affected. So really it only needs to be assessed on merits, not on whether people like it.
Central government also gets confused, as I've seen them refer to unitaries by their old county counci names many years afterwards, on official documents to boot.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
There are, on occasion, some pretty horrible goings-on in places like Papua-New Guinea.
And the UK!
Obligatory Scottish angle.
'Alexander "Sawney" Bean (sometimes also given as Sandy Bane, etc.) is a legendary figure, said to have been the head of a 45-member clan in Scotland in the 16th century that murdered and cannibalised over 1,000 people in 25 years. According to the legend, Bean and his clan members were eventually caught by a search party sent by King James VI, and were executed for their heinous crimes.'
I don't imagine the combined forces of Reform and Conservative will have an overall majority in 2028/9, but if they do it would be the most hilarious coalition of chaos ever. The idea that Farage and his mates, in conjunction with the Tories, could form any sort of stable government is for the birds.
In a sense it is hard to say. Neither Reform nor the Tories have presented anything like a credible set of principles, policies, direction, use of power and competence demonstration. In particular, how each would successfully depart significantly from the current lot in power.
Until then NOTA is going to do quite well, and the current 3 and bit way split between unconvinced voters carries on.
The only benefit to not holding elections in 2025 for the government, IMHO, is to avoid potential further momentum for Reform.
Otherwise I really cannot see Labour being too bothered. I hardly think they’ll have a stellar performance, but they will be flattered by the current composition of the seats in play.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
I disagree with the consensus. Yes if the parties merged today and there was an election tomorrow it would play out as per the header and posters.
But over time, as we have seen with the Republicans in the US, voters can come round to positions they themselves would have seen as absurd, and not "them", a decade earlier.
That works if Reform merge into the Tories but Farage isn't going to do that.
Why not? It has been his stated and long term ambition for over a decade. Of course he will, if the time and circumstance is right.
Agree: Amongst the solid tips (Laying Farage not to be PM) I can sense the general direction of the broad right of UK politics heading toward Reform/changing the Tories to a more Reform like direction which seems to be being dismissed (tepid analysis pace Dura-Ace) here..
I’m happy to be laying Farage as next PM but if there was a market on if Farage was to ever be PM I wouldn’t be laying him.
Well then the issue becomes "if so, then when?". He is already 60 and we have a clear 5 year Parliament ahead.
The oldest PM to assume office for the first time was Palmerston who was aged 70, but who had been a key figure in Parliament and government for several decades before. The oldest PM ever was Gladstone who was 84 when he retired at the end of his fourth term.
So, if you decide to back Farage becoming PM "sometime", you need to ask yourself a) how long Farage will live in health and strength and b) how long it would take RefUk to become a party of government that would allow Farage to be PM. While obviously "Farage next PM" is a clear lay, I think "Farage PM sometime" is also probably a lay, just at much lower prices. Father Time may be a bigger enemy than Kemi here.
Reform currently have 5 seats in the House of Commons.
This feels like Trump's going to jail/Putin's got cancer level analysis.
Well its not impossible impossible, just not very likely: how do you get from 5 seats and 14% of the vote to the kind of support that gets Farage into Number Ten in a time line where Farage is still young enough to do the job?
Even if you think Labour falls apart, for which the only evidence is the more hysterical right wing commentary, there is still plenty of competition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. We cannot now expect at GE before, say, 2029, when Farage will be 65. The odds of Farage being able to take power then are not great- he has strong personal negatives and his signature policy of Brexit is not popular these days either. But even supposing RefUk make a strong advance at the next GE, to get from 5 seats to the needed 326 seats is so unprecedented that it has to involve the total collapse of both Labour and the Tories at the same time. Again maybe the fash-curious here could see it happen, but I honestly just don´t see how. But, say, RefUk get 250 gains- more than the 211 record gain Labour just made- do the other parties just roll over and say "on you go Nige"? Again not impossible impossible, just not very likely. Farage would have to wait out another Parliament. Then he´d have to advance again at any subsequent GE. Even if the Parliament does not go full term, we are still talking potentially quite long periods of time- even in the absolute best case he is late sixties by the third GE, and again he´d have to have another historic GE result to even get close to being PM.
So I stand by laying "Farage as PM sometime" because it requires historic changes in support, the simultaneous collapse of both Labour and the Tories and the elimination of the personal and policy negatives for RefUk and all the time the clock is ticking on Farage´s age and health.
I'm hopeless at judging peoples ages and Farage does look pretty fit to me, however when he was in the jungle my wife looked him up and was shocked by his age. She thought he looked old for someone who was then 59. I was 69 at the time and she thought I looked a lot younger. If he is a heavy smoker and drinker (I don't actually know if either are true or just part of his image). What will 5 years do to him?
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The error is perhaps in assuming it was a peaceful time. Maybe I'm wrong but I suspect the absence of evidence of violence in early Bronze Age doesn't outweigh humans having a violent nature when threatened.
That did seem like an odd sentence to include. I mean, there were comparitively few people around at the time, so instances of mass violence would likewise be fewer and harder for evidence to have survived, so I'd be curious of the nature of analysis and if it really was more peaceful compared to others.
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
I've just been reading the original paper which is happily open access - the Graun has a linky if the BBC doesn't. The issue is the cannibalism. Very thorough, right down to cracking open bones for the marrow. Which obviously surprises the researchers (who are in any case being very careful in their arguments).
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
There are, on occasion, some pretty horrible goings-on in places like Papua-New Guinea.
And the UK!
Obligatory Scottish angle.
'Alexander "Sawney" Bean (sometimes also given as Sandy Bane, etc.) is a legendary figure, said to have been the head of a 45-member clan in Scotland in the 16th century that murdered and cannibalised over 1,000 people in 25 years. According to the legend, Bean and his clan members were eventually caught by a search party sent by King James VI, and were executed for their heinous crimes.'
SKS Lab is in for a bloodbath so let's not bother with LE2025
In county council seats where they don’t have many councilors.
It’s a view but reality is the 2025 elections are Tory heavy
Many Counties would normally have swung from Con to Lab
Until austerity Reeves decided to sacrifice those Candidates on the alter of being bigger bastards than the Tories to satisfy their paymaster donors
Many is a bit of a stretch.
Looking at just the County elections the highest proportion of Labour representation I can see is 32% of councillors, and most only have about 10% down to as low as 2-3%. Even with a decent swing to Labour I doubt the ceiling is very high for most of those.
And I'd expect the government to lose seats in locals even shortly after winning. 1 year after taking power Labour lost seats in 1998, and in 2011 whilst the Tories gained seats, Labour gained 10x as many, since it was driven by the LDs losing bucketloads. In 1980 Thatcher lost loads of seats. Labour and the Tories both lost seats in 2016, though not many for either.
So whilst avoiding a local election drubbing could be a factor, it doesn't seem likely to be a big one.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The only benefit to not holding elections in 2025 for the government, IMHO, is to avoid potential further momentum for Reform.
Otherwise I really cannot see Labour being too bothered. I hardly think they’ll have a stellar performance, but they will be flattered by the current composition of the seats in play.
2026 is the big test.
Yes, I cannot see many positives for the government in delaying matters, particularly since the combined authorities they will want to create will not have their constituent councils line up their current elections, so there are better ways to align them with a new mayoral system.
I've been looking at a markscheme for AQA English Language (which is a board I don't normally teach, but I'm stretching a point for an existing tutee).
In their model answer for question 2, they have written this:
The train in Source A is big as it has lots of carriages because it says, ‘five sleeping cars’. This is different to the train in Source B, which is smaller. The train in Source B is not big as it is described as a ‘little engine’ and it has one carriage.
I mean - what's the fucking point of English Language marks for grammar if even the sodding exam boards make awful mistakes like that?
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
Since the last Labour government through the Coalition and the Tory governments that followed unitarisation has been moving forward, the Starmer government is just accelerating things alongisde its combined authority plans. People might say their district is good and the county bad, but it's not like its inevitable that is so across the country (nor even that unitaries will all be good at governing), but the cost savings are potentially enormous and with local government as it is it just makes sense.
Will require stronger town and parish councils though as abolishing district councils to create unitaries just reduces local links to your local council otherwise which is less likely to be based in your nearest town but a town or city over the other side of the county
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
Redcliffe-Maud (which is probably pretty close to the council map we end up with) was over fifty years ago. The brute logic hasn't really changed since then.
Looking at the wikipedia page on the Redcliffe-Maud report, the extended strategic mayoral authorities sounds analagous to suggested 'provincial councils'
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
The pretext is that they want to abolish all the district councils and make everywhere unitary. Terrible idea - round here the district councils work well, but the county councils is poor, so the practical outworking will be to reduce the functioning of the lot to the level of badness of the County Council. Personally I'd abolish the County and give all the powers to the Districts.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
That 'plan' has been kicked around by at least two of the main parties, hasn't it? I don't think the Districts could support the 'hinterland' necessary for good government. Social services are but one example.
Since the last Labour government through the Coalition and the Tory governments that followed unitarisation has been moving forward, the Starmer government is just accelerating things alongisde its combined authority plans. People might say their district is good and the county bad, but it's not like its inevitable that is so across the country (nor even that unitaries will all be good at governing), but the cost savings are potentially enormous and with local government as it is it just makes sense.
Will require stronger town and parish councils though as abolishing district councils to create unitaries just reduces local links to your local council otherwise which is less likely to be based in your nearest town but a town or city over the other side of the county
That's what strong area committees are for, you can devolve down things to areas within a unitary.
Not that I disagree with towns and parishes taking on more, but as has been discussed before a great many of the very small ones simply lack any capacity for that - especially as most concentrate on keeping their precepts as low as possible and thus most don't do as much as they could already. A lot of them don't want to be stronger, and don't take on powers even if they could (or have elections to enable general power of competence).
Also, ask people on the far side of larger districts if they feel they have good 'local links' with it and I'd bet good money they would say they don't - there are many big towns within a district in most cases.
Good. Levelling up may have been decent politics in the short term, but it was never going to work. Shovelling yet more public money at regions with already crushingly large public sectors was never going to do anything to help them. In fact, it probably would have made things much worse, as it penalised the enterprising and successful parts of the country.
Of course Northerners are a lazy and greedy bunch, who will always vote for the party that promises them the biggest handouts, so you can see how they'd have lapped it up. But it was a socialist policy, and so would have been wasteful, counterproductive, probably corrupt and definitely ineffective.
Much better to save public money and lower taxes and debt lower than otherwise instead.
Levelling up (which I have been involved with since before it was called levelling up) isn’t a handout. It’s about utilising fantastic resources in the regions (which are unknown or underexploited) or putting in place the infrastructure and investments needed to make a location economically attractive
I thought it was about winning votes up north with false promises?
Some of us focus on doing stuff that needs to be done not making cynical comments from the sidelines
It's not entirely cynical. Levelling up was never given the amount of resources needed to really shift the economic balance between north and south. And that was very definitely implied in the politicians' promises.
Although we did face other challenges in 2019/20/21
She is correct. I will not vote Conservative if they merge with Reform.
Though a pact not to stand against each other might just be OK. Tories get a clear run at the Shires, Reform at the Red Wall.
You're making the same mistake as Hyufd.
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
The Tories can win without the red wall, but they need a message that resonates with a number of people they’ve pushed away from in recent years. Essentially, the professional classes, business owners, entrepreneurial folk, and strivers. But that isn’t an easy way back and it requires them to reconcile themselves, I would suggest, with a slightly more economically coherent and less purist Brexit vision which they show little signs of wanting to face up to.
It’s why the Tories are in such a mess. It’s very hard to reconcile their coalition. Labour have a similar problem on the left but they are also squatting on much of the centre ground so they’re getting away with it better, for now.
In the meantime you have a whole host of voters who are fed up with Labour, fed up with the Tories and are ready to vote for AN Other in the shape of Farage. Getting those voters back is hard. Both parties have made it even harder for themselves with their actions over the years.
The Conservatives cannot win a majority without the gains they made in 2019.
They need to gain 200 seats from their present position and they have no chance in many of those lost to the LibDems.
Which means that the likes of Redcar and Scunthorpe have to be won by the Conservatives to gain a majority.
In fact its likely that the Conservatives will need to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe just to have the most MPs.
The electoral geography of England has changed -- for every Wycombe (Conservative in 1997 but now likely lost permanently) they have to make a gain somewhere which was Labour in 2010.
Except Reform were second in half of the redwall seats that were Labour until 2019 but which Boris won but went Labour again in July (or Reform would be second now given the biggest swing since July has been Labour to Reform with the Tories little changed)
It's quite incredible that North Korea has now invaded Europe.
And Europe's reaction is a mere shoulder-shrug and "meh!"
(And yes, I think 'invasion' is the correct word, given the reported number of troops, and the fact they're officially sanctioned by the NK government.)
On topic: Nigel Farage is reliant on people being het up about immigration. He could struggle if that issue cools down. Anger about immigration is his Rodri.
The only benefit to not holding elections in 2025 for the government, IMHO, is to avoid potential further momentum for Reform.
Otherwise I really cannot see Labour being too bothered. I hardly think they’ll have a stellar performance, but they will be flattered by the current composition of the seats in play.
2026 is the big test.
We are only getting a White Paper today. It will only go into law some point in 2025. If reports are correct, existing local authorities to be merged will be consulted on who they merge with. The new authorities will take a while to organize. I would suggest that the chances of everything being ready for elections next May is virtually nil.
Incidentally I note the Archbishop of York is under pressure now too (although if that standard was applied consistently a number of former Ofsted chiefs would not rest easily).
I was trying to work out what would happen in the event of a vacancy in both Canterbury and York. That’s not happened since the 1650s and never, as far as I know, while the hierarchy was functioning.
I presume either the Bishop of London - who is also under pressure - would be asked to take charge, or the Bench of Bishops would elect one of their number to carry out the functions of the office of Archbishop until an appointment is made.
If the latter, that has interesting betting implications depending on who they choose. Whoever it is might suddenly become favourite to be archbishop especially if, as seems possible, they picked Martyn Snow.
The situation in York province is complicated by the vacancies of Durham and Carlisle. I imagine Nick Baines as the longest serving Bishop would have to step up.
If it were the case that he did everything he could for reasons of law, and had done everything he could to keep the offender from anything that looked like preferment, then I would reluctantly support him remaining in post.
But I don't believe - listening to the programme - that that is the case. He had the moral authority and responsibility to intervene, for example by withdrawing the offender's permission to officiate (PTO) in his Diocese. He did not take action.
Therefore imo ++York needs to stand down.
Although if the individual had been through due process and the church authorities had decided on a punishment (I don’t know the specifics of this case) then how is it just for ++York to apply an extra punishment
If a small charity allowed someone who is a previous safeguarding risk into a safeguarding covered role, they would have a bridge dropped on them. Rightly. This has happened.
It is quite simple. Why should different rules apply?
Though of course they do. Look at the large charities and the behaviour of staff in developing countries…
I don’t know the specifics of this case.
But he’d gone through the disciplinary process and a punishment applied. Suspending him would be an additional punishment after the event.
The church believes in redemption. You son, you are punished, you are forgiven and get to continue
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
On topic: Nigel Farage is reliant on people being het up about immigration. He could struggle if that issue cools down. Anger about immigration is his Rodri.
Genuine question, how do you see that issue cooling down in the next 5 years? I simply cannot.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
On topic: Nigel Farage is reliant on people being het up about immigration. He could struggle if that issue cools down. Anger about immigration is his Rodri.
Genuine question, how do you see that issue cooling down in the next 5 years? I simply cannot.
The numbers will almost certainly fall. Also if the country can get back on an economic growth path that will help as well. Plus more building and infrastructure will ease pressures. Its possible anyway.
I demand justice! Someone contact the historical crimes unit, this is a nation of laws.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
I've been looking at a markscheme for AQA English Language (which is a board I don't normally teach, but I'm stretching a point for an existing tutee).
In their model answer for question 2, they have written this:
The train in Source A is big as it has lots of carriages because it says, ‘five sleeping cars’. This is different to the train in Source B, which is smaller. The train in Source B is not big as it is described as a ‘little engine’ and it has one carriage.
I mean - what's the fucking point of English Language marks for grammar if even the sodding exam boards make awful mistakes like that?
Not sure what you mean. The spg mark is applied separately in relevant questions holistically. Perhaps this answer was purely a content answer?
The usual weasel words from Duncan Smith on China.
The utter hypocrite sat on Government for 14 years whilst Prince Andrew was being courted by Chinese spies and did nothing.
Now He blames Starmer just for suggestions we should do trade with China.
Similar bullcrap from Tugenhadt who sat in Government whilst numerous Tories set up rogue Companies to corruptly bid for PPE contracts at hugely inflated prices from ah China.
Add Mr Opportunist the MP for Mar A Lago... He wants to name the Chinese spy yet wants £400m off a South African runt who mass produces badged Cars using Chinese parts in China.
You really couldn't make this up from these weasel spineless opportunists.
SKS is right to be circmspect but he is also 100% right to seek up to open up Chinese markets to boost growth and knowledge.
Shutting the doors totally won't stop a single spy, it will merely be a gross case of cutting off your nose, ears, eyes, tongue etc to spite your face
Thank God we have serious people back in Government not these idiotic imbeciles.
On topic: Nigel Farage is reliant on people being het up about immigration. He could struggle if that issue cools down. Anger about immigration is his Rodri.
Genuine question, how do you see that issue cooling down in the next 5 years? I simply cannot.
Some possibilities.
1. Numbers will come down, due mostly to things the previous government did to retighten rules that they had previously overloosened. And whilst it's a bit unfair for the current government to take the credit for that, they are also taking the blame for the bad consequences of pervious government decisions, so it sort of balances out.
2. @MoonRabbit may well be right, that the flow of migrants across Europe has already slowed down, so fewer boat people at our end next year. Positive actions like closing the German legal loophole may help as well.
3. A lot of the immigration anger fades if the pressure on public services fades. If people can't see a doctor easily, the twisted logic that says "the answer is to have fewer of Them" sounds compelling. (It's twisted because of how many of Them are working in healthcare.)
None of these are certain, and they may not add up to enough. But they're all possible.
The usual weasel words from Duncan Smith on China.
The utter hypocrite sat on Government for 14 years whilst Prince Andrew was being courted by Chinese spies and did nothing.
Now He blames Starmer just for suggestions we should do trade with China.
Similar bullcrap from Tugenhadt who sat in Government whilst numerous Tories set up rogue Companies to corruptly bid for PPE contracts at hugely inflated prices from ah China.
Add Mr Opportunist the MP for Mar A Lago... He wants to name the Chinese spy yet wants £400m off a South African runt who mass produces badged Cars using Chinese parts in China.
You really couldn't make this up from these weasel spineless opportunists.
SKS is right to be circmspect but he is also 100% right to seek up to open up Chinese markets to boost growth and knowledge.
Shutting the doors totally won't stop a single spy, it will merely be a gross case of cutting off your nose, ears, eyes, tongue etc to spite your face
Thank God we have serious people back in Government not these idiotic imbeciles.
Comments
It is quite simple. Why should different rules apply?
Though of course they do. Look at the large charities and the behaviour of staff in developing countries…
But fundamentally the unbalanced nature of the UK economy drives a lot of the problems / challenges the country faces. As ever Dominic Cummings was pretty good on diagnosing the problem. His solutions not so much.
Indeed any deal would be more likely to occur after a general election if the Tories and Reform combined have enough seats for a majority but seperately neither does. Hence in Italy centre right Forza Italia are now in government with populist right Brothers of Italy of PM Meloni and Lega and in Spain the centre right PP and populist right Vox will form an alliance for government if they win the next election and in New Zealand the centre right Nationals of PM Luxon lead a government including populist right New Zealand First and the libertarian ACT both of which have similar policies on immigration and the economy to Reform here
There is no way back to government for the Conservatives without them winning those same Red Wall seats they won in 2019.
The Conservatives need to gain 200 seats - it is mathematically impossible to gain that number in the Shires or what Hyufd calls the 'middle class soft leaver' seats.
Not to mention that its going to be far, far easier for the Conservatives to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe than the likes of Cheltenham and Chichester.
If asylum cases are being dealt with, immigration is down, waiting lists drop, energy bills come down, and houses get built, then they'll be in pole position next election. Whether it happens, we'll find out, (and it may rely on no huge shocks elsewhere in the World), but all those things will take years to happen, so it'll be some time before we can genuinely judge.
The economic theory behind “levelling up” is that the underutilised resources of the area can be bought into activity. Which offers more and faster growth - from a lower level - enabling that area to begin to catch up.
https://x.com/henryriley1/status/1868566709847949366?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
The simple fact is a lot of the redwall seats which were Labour until 2019 would only ever vote Conservative under Boris, they won't vote for any other Tory but they might vote for Farage.
The Tories are better off focusing on the seats Cameron and May won which are actually comfortably over 200 seats and indeed closer to 300 seats (albeit the bluewall Remain seats are sadly lost to the LDs post Brexit for the time being unfortunately)
And some of them have cocks on them this size!
Previously - enough jobs in southern England, not enough jobs elsewhere.
Currently - unaffordable housing in southern England, affordable housing elsewhere.
There's also an economic imbalance based on age.
I don't think the Conservatives have ever faced a meaningful challenge to both their right and their left before. It's blooming hard to solve that one. It might take Farage being wheeled off to a Home first.
Tories want universal credit, Reform want contributory welfare only.
Tories back NHS with more use of private sector and private health, Reform want a largely private health insurance funded healthcare system the main differences.
The most hard right Tory members and councillors and indeed voters are now in Reform anyway
Do we have good examples of where this has worked (UK or elsewhere)? Maybe I'm just unaware of the models we could be following.
North and South Korea were - de jure, if not de facto - part of the same nation, with governments in the north and south both claiming sovereignty, up until the Panmunjom settlement.
Russia invaded Ukraine; Korea was a civil war, where the great powers took sides.
It’s why the Tories are in such a mess. It’s very hard to reconcile their coalition. Labour have a similar problem on the left but they are also squatting on much of the centre ground so they’re getting away with it better, for now.
In the meantime you have a whole host of voters who are fed up with Labour, fed up with the Tories and are ready to vote for AN Other in the shape of Farage. Getting those voters back is hard. Both parties have made it even harder for themselves with their actions over the years.
And also again are ignoring that the electoral world has changed since 2010.
Scientists have uncovered the aftermath of an "exceptionally violent" attack about 4,000 years ago in Somerset when at least 37 people appear to have been butchered and likely eaten.
It is the largest case of violence between humans identified in early Bronze Age England, which had been considered a peaceful time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crl3jn3elz3o
https://blog.bham.ac.uk/cityredi/levelling-up-there-are-international-success-stories-the-uk-should-look-to/
One obvious one is to tilt the planning playing field, particularly for industry. Make it really cheap/easy to build industrial buildings in deprived areas, and people looking to build or expand businesses are more likely to move there, and existing businesses will find it easier to compete.
Another (really cheap) one would be for the government to provide finance for business equipment purchases. Give the people who finance things like CNC machine tools a pile of money to lend out, charged to them at 0%. They have to take the credit risk from the customer (for which they will be allowed to charge) so the gov doesn't get legged up with a load of bad debt.
Result - loads of small businesses expanding on the back of finance costing 1-2% rather than 7-8%. Target it by postcode if you want to use this to power leveling up.
Much more expensive but very effective - my local council ran some really good leveling up grants with their leveling up cash - you could get 80% of a spend up to £10k, 50% of a spend up to £20k, 20% of a spend up to £100k. Mate of mine combined his £50k bounceback loan and one of these grants to buy his first modern £75k CNC milling machine with minimal external finance. He's now running a machine shop with 4 modern CNC machines and targeting £500k annual turnover. If every council had used their leveling up funds this well, it would have made a massive difference, unfortunately most of them utterly wasted it instead (usually on doomed attempts to prop up dead high streets).
@NickFerrariLBC
asks if the 2025 elections for 21 local councils & 10 unitary authorities will go ahead
Local govt Minister Jim McMahon refuses to say
"There will be full consultation"
In a way it is nice that the government has shown some interest in local government to the point it is pushing ahead quickly with its expansion of strategic mayoral authorities and the like, but it still looks like a big old mess to me, and there are far bigger problems facing local government financing around social care and SEND to worry about, rather than the flashy, but less meaningful, and entirely arbitrary agglomeration of county areas into another bloody layer of political administration.
If we are lucky maybe in the 2030s we might get a chance to fix some decades old problems.
Even if you think Labour falls apart, for which the only evidence is the more hysterical right wing commentary, there is still plenty of competition from the Tories and the Lib Dems. We cannot now expect at GE before, say, 2029, when Farage will be 65. The odds of Farage being able to take power then are not great- he has strong personal negatives and his signature policy of Brexit is not popular these days either. But even supposing RefUk make a strong advance at the next GE, to get from 5 seats to the needed 326 seats is so unprecedented that it has to involve the total collapse of both Labour and the Tories at the same time. Again maybe the fash-curious here could see it happen, but I honestly just don´t see how. But, say, RefUk get 250 gains- more than the 211 record gain Labour just made- do the other parties just roll over and say "on you go Nige"? Again not impossible impossible, just not very likely. Farage would have to wait out another Parliament. Then he´d have to advance again at any subsequent GE. Even if the Parliament does not go full term, we are still talking potentially quite long periods of time- even in the absolute best case he is late sixties by the third GE, and again he´d have to have another historic GE result to even get close to being PM.
So I stand by laying "Farage as PM sometime" because it requires historic changes in support, the simultaneous collapse of both Labour and the Tories and the elimination of the personal and policy negatives for RefUk and all the time the clock is ticking on Farage´s age and health.
We don't have any will to fix our decades old problems anyway, and if we can manage to plod along with things only getting moderately worse year on year, we never will ahve the will, because that's easier.
Sounds more trouble that it is worth to me, better to just set the first mayoral terms to a lower than usual amount so they line up in future years with the local council cycles (where these are even on the same cycle, which they are not all, which makes me think the rumour is bunk).
Edit - I assume that's the basis of the rumour anywhere, that is how I came across the idea, so if there's another reason behind the idea I have no clue.
They need to gain 200 seats from their present position and they have no chance in many of those lost to the LibDems.
Which means that the likes of Redcar and Scunthorpe have to be won by the Conservatives to gain a majority.
In fact its likely that the Conservatives will need to gain Redcar and Scunthorpe just to have the most MPs.
The electoral geography of England has changed -- for every Wycombe (Conservative in 1997 but now likely lost permanently) they have to make a gain somewhere which was Labour in 2010.
You wouldn't bother to say something like 'the sun will rise in the morning' would you?
The government may have to confront the elephant in the room that has been waiting for all western governments (certainly in Europe) for some time. There isn’t going to be as much money to do as much things as the government currently does, or certainly in the areas is currently prioritises. How do we fix that problem, and who are the winners and losers from it. None of the solutions to the problem are, to the current political classes, in any way palatable. Yet decisions must be made eventually.
I do agree with the header to a great extent though. It was also reflected in lots of polling around election time, which suggested Reform voters were similarly split, with at least as many likely to go to Lab/Lib/Green as to the Tories.
The real reason they want to do it is to avoid the likely embarrassment of coming third in their first electoral test since gaining office.
On topic Farage is up there with Galloway as one of the last people I'd want to see PM, but to be fair to him, Churchill was 66 in 1940. So being in his mid-sixties would not really be a bar. In any event plenty of 19th Century statesmen held high off ice their 70's.
Of course it might be academic as far as I'm concerned; I'll be in my early 90's in 2029!
Excl: Government will move to scrap district councils in its devolution white paper on Monday, sparking the biggest local government reorganisation in 50 years
https://bsky.app/profile/jenwilliamsft.bsky.social/post/3ld7km6icac2s
If a council is about to be abolished, there's some logic in not bothering with elections.
Though given how much trouble those elections are going to cause the Conservatives, and how little skin Labour have in this year of the cycle...
Or if it was just an extension of the idea that hunter gatherer societies or isolated island communities etc did not really have violence, which I think has been largely debunked but has lived on through patronising perceptions of naiive innocent native societies.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/16/something-horrible-somerset-pit-reveals-bronze-age-cannibalism
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/darker-angels-of-our-nature-early-bronze-age-butchered-human-remains-from-charterhouse-warren-somerset-uk/93EBB135C857C7B7992FC80A4ED927AF
Edit: survival of evidence is discussed. Obvs dumping them down a pothole on Mendip helped preserve it!
It's the strategic mayoral authorities I don't get and am very interested what the final details are, as pretty random combinations of 1.5-2m people seems to just be retaining a two tier approach just on a wider scale. Though there is at least talk of trying to make things more standardised for the new regional mayoralties in terms of powers etc, which is positive.
In terms of how much trouble the elections might be, my sense is the Conservatives are relatively optimistic about them...if Reform fail to organise well.
So may as well abolish elections Kept Hitler in power for a decade.
I really don’t get why ministers go on the morning news round when they can’t say anything until later
It’s a view but reality is the 2025 elections are Tory heavy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_Kingdom_local_elections
Until austerity Reeves decided to sacrifice those Candidates on the alter of being bigger bastards than the Tories to satisfy their paymaster donors
Central government also gets confused, as I've seen them refer to unitaries by their old county counci names many years afterwards, on official documents to boot.
So the low point of 2021 seemed impossible not to recover in 2025.
SKS has managed it though.
'Alexander "Sawney" Bean (sometimes also given as Sandy Bane, etc.) is a legendary figure, said to have been the head of a 45-member clan in Scotland in the 16th century that murdered and cannibalised over 1,000 people in 25 years. According to the legend, Bean and his clan members were eventually caught by a search party sent by King James VI, and were executed for their heinous crimes.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawney_Bean
Sharp eyed PBers may spot a PB regular in the Wiki piece before he hit the big time of obsessing about drones and Woke on here.
Until then NOTA is going to do quite well, and the current 3 and bit way split between unconvinced voters carries on.
Otherwise I really cannot see Labour being too bothered. I hardly think they’ll have a stellar performance, but they will be flattered by the current composition of the seats in play.
2026 is the big test.
Mesopotamia, sure.
But even then, only just.
He'll look like Joe Biden.
Looking at just the County elections the highest proportion of Labour representation I can see is 32% of councillors, and most only have about 10% down to as low as 2-3%. Even with a decent swing to Labour I doubt the ceiling is very high for most of those.
And I'd expect the government to lose seats in locals even shortly after winning. 1 year after taking power Labour lost seats in 1998, and in 2011 whilst the Tories gained seats, Labour gained 10x as many, since it was driven by the LDs losing bucketloads. In 1980 Thatcher lost loads of seats. Labour and the Tories both lost seats in 2016, though not many for either.
So whilst avoiding a local election drubbing could be a factor, it doesn't seem likely to be a big one.
I've been looking at a markscheme for AQA English Language (which is a board I don't normally teach, but I'm stretching a point for an existing tutee).
In their model answer for question 2, they have written this:
The train in Source A is big as it has lots of carriages because it says, ‘five sleeping cars’. This is different to the train in Source B, which is smaller. The train in Source B is not big as it is described as a ‘little engine’ and it has one carriage.
I mean - what's the fucking point of English Language marks for grammar if even the sodding exam boards make awful mistakes like that?
And the sooner it is given to Lee Anderson, the better.
Not that I disagree with towns and parishes taking on more, but as has been discussed before a great many of the very small ones simply lack any capacity for that - especially as most concentrate on keeping their precepts as low as possible and thus most don't do as much as they could already. A lot of them don't want to be stronger, and don't take on powers even if they could (or have elections to enable general power of competence).
Also, ask people on the far side of larger districts if they feel they have good 'local links' with it and I'd bet good money they would say they don't - there are many big towns within a district in most cases.
But he’d gone through the disciplinary process and a punishment applied. Suspending him would be an additional punishment after the event.
The church believes in redemption. You son, you are punished, you are forgiven and get to continue
The law of the jungle applied.
But then, I'm only an A Level physics marker
The utter hypocrite sat on Government for 14 years whilst Prince Andrew was being courted by Chinese spies and did nothing.
Now He blames Starmer just for suggestions we should do trade with China.
Similar bullcrap from Tugenhadt who sat in Government whilst numerous Tories set up rogue Companies to corruptly bid for PPE contracts at hugely inflated prices from ah China.
Add Mr Opportunist the MP for Mar A Lago... He wants to name the Chinese spy yet wants £400m off a South African runt who mass produces badged Cars using Chinese parts in China.
You really couldn't make this up from these weasel spineless opportunists.
SKS is right to be circmspect but he is also 100% right to seek up to open up Chinese markets to boost growth and knowledge.
Shutting the doors totally won't stop a single spy, it will merely be a gross case of cutting off your nose, ears, eyes, tongue etc to spite your face
Thank God we have serious people back in Government not these idiotic imbeciles.
1. Numbers will come down, due mostly to things the previous government did to retighten rules that they had previously overloosened. And whilst it's a bit unfair for the current government to take the credit for that, they are also taking the blame for the bad consequences of pervious government decisions, so it sort of balances out.
2. @MoonRabbit may well be right, that the flow of migrants across Europe has already slowed down, so fewer boat people at our end next year. Positive actions like closing the German legal loophole may help as well.
3. A lot of the immigration anger fades if the pressure on public services fades. If people can't see a doctor easily, the twisted logic that says "the answer is to have fewer of Them" sounds compelling. (It's twisted because of how many of Them are working in healthcare.)
None of these are certain, and they may not add up to enough. But they're all possible.
Truly fascinating.