The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
You offer Reform ( with evidence) and the Tories ( without evidence) as the big two parties after the imminent death of Labour.
Now you may be correct that Labour 's fate is sealed and they are finished after an unbroken 28 years of mismanaging the economy, but you seem to ignore who fills that vacuum, assuming it is Reform and the Conservatives.
With a moribund Labour Party I won't be voting for Farage or an even more extreme Jenrick. It might be the LDs or it might be a resurrected "Change UK". I doubt I am alone.
I'm arguing that the Tories themselves will become the equivalent of a resurrected Change UK. Perhaps Anna Soubry will even rejoin them.
They will be the default choice for people who don't want Reform and don't want to waste their votes.
Is that likely when Badenoch, Jenrick and Braverman are ramping up the racist themes with more mainstream Tories like Cleverly hanging on their coat tails? Or are you assuming all the whack-jobs leave for Reform?That being so and the Conservative brand in the toilet why even keep the name? Certainly one wouldn't use it without a qualifying prefix like, New, Democratic, Liberal, One Nation, or Nice (Not Nasty).
Presumably those of us - that small lingering minority of, currently, 50% of the electorate - too stupid and behind the times to fall in with the new anti-woke duopoly will somehow be disenfranchised so that our stupid views don’t get an airing.
A bit tricky when neither of the duopoly are in power and the next general election will be after Trump has completed his second term. But no doubt it’s being worked on as we speak.
I do find William's posts fascinating. I tend to scroll past most of the right wing hardliners and the "Reeves is shit" posters, but there is often some compelling other worldly reasoning for his wild narratives.
Feck the woke twats , their 2 seconds in the sun is over, bunch of wishy washy pillocks
Suggest going back to the 40% turnip juice. To early to go full cask strength.
Greetings from your war-torn future, and the urban trenches of Rangoon
All quite odd here. Lots of wartime theatre, barbed wire, soldiers, guns - but an absence of drama. Blackouts common. Lots of little diesel generators - reminds me of Ukraine. Definite sense the regime doesn't want tourists, everything is made as hard as possible, you can't hire cars, book trains, and there are vanishingly few internal flights, and those that do exist seem to fly at 5am
Internet is throttled everywhere. Lots of sites barred. eSims don't work. The generals have a boot on the neck of the World Wide Web
Good curries and some nice pastries, however
On balance, recommend for a trip or not?
guaranteed shithole run by arseholes
You're going to have to narrow that down, malc. From you, that description probably encompasses over half the globe.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
For all the justified criticism of Labour, particularly during the Corbyn era and Blair's international expansionism wars, I am not sure that is the most compelling claim, unless you bring in the notion that othering asylum seekers, benefit claimants and specific racial and religious groups is the desire of working Britains.
Is it in the interests of working class communities to have their local hotel filled with male asylum seekers?
What difference does it make to the community?
Don't you think that a large amount of male asylum seekers with nothing to do and no means of legitimately earning money is going to be a problem?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Hmm. Colour me skeptical.
Any case, William, I am not a "20th century relic". Please retract or face a period of being ignored.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Just shows they were stupid in first place, if they had brains to be plumber, joiner , plasterer, etc they would be coining it in. He who laughs last laughs loudest.
They were told not to, by everyone in authority, from school onwards.
Ironically, just as the former snobberies and limitations on pay for the “manual” trades ended.
A plumber can earn £60k, now.
As the middle class collapses, though, who will pay the plumbers ?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
For all the justified criticism of Labour, particularly during the Corbyn era and Blair's international expansionism wars, I am not sure that is the most compelling claim, unless you bring in the notion that othering asylum seekers, benefit claimants and specific racial and religious groups is the desire of working Britains.
Is it in the interests of working class communities to have their local hotel filled with male asylum seekers?
What difference does it make to the community?
Don't you think that a large amount of male asylum seekers with nothing to do and no means of legitimately earning money is going to be a problem?
Possibly, but I don't see how that is a "working class" issue or how them being in "hotels" is relevant to the "working class" either.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
The C*****n thing looks pretty weird. Which normal person let alone a public figure posts porn on their social media? Either he was the dumbest, most arrogant twat going (a live possibility) who thought he could get away with anything, or *insert conspiracy theory*. Predictably the blood libel types are going a bit mental while the lads who always take the 'its all antisemitism' line are so far quiet.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Hmm. Colour me skeptical.
Any case, William, I am not a "20th century relic". Please retract or face a period of being ignored.
The rise in the minimum wage ahead of inflation or earnings in general probably does account for the bottom sector - or at least, those in work - maintaining their share.
But what the raw figures don't take account of is things like housing costs also running ahead of general inflation. A more meaningful set of figures would be how shares of disposable income has changed over time, or where income is going for each group.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
The C*****n thing looks pretty weird. Which normal person let alone a public figure posts porn on their social media? Either he was the dumbest, most arrogant twat going (a live possibility) who thought he could get away with anything, or *insert conspiracy theory*. Predictably the blood libel types are going a bit mental while the lads who always take the 'its all antisemitism' are so far quiet.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
You offer Reform ( with evidence) and the Tories ( without evidence) as the big two parties after the imminent death of Labour.
Now you may be correct that Labour 's fate is sealed and they are finished after an unbroken 28 years of mismanaging the economy, but you seem to ignore who fills that vacuum, assuming it is Reform and the Conservatives.
With a moribund Labour Party I won't be voting for Farage or an even more extreme Jenrick. It might be the LDs or it might be a resurrected "Change UK". I doubt I am alone.
I'm arguing that the Tories themselves will become the equivalent of a resurrected Change UK. Perhaps Anna Soubry will even rejoin them.
They will be the default choice for people who don't want Reform and don't want to waste their votes.
Is that likely when Badenoch, Jenrick and Braverman are ramping up the racist themes with more mainstream Tories like Cleverly hanging on their coat tails? Or are you assuming all the whack-jobs leave for Reform?That being so and the Conservative brand in the toilet why even keep the name? Certainly one wouldn't use it without a qualifying prefix like, New, Democratic, Liberal, One Nation, or Nice (Not Nasty).
Presumably those of us - that small lingering minority of, currently, 50% of the electorate - too stupid and behind the times to fall in with the new anti-woke duopoly will somehow be disenfranchised so that our stupid views don’t get an airing.
A bit tricky when neither of the duopoly are in power and the next general election will be after Trump has completed his second term. But no doubt it’s being worked on as we speak.
I do find William's posts fascinating. I tend to scroll past most of the right wing hardliners and the "Reeves is shit" posters, but there is often some compelling other worldly reasoning for his wild narratives.
Feck the woke twats , their 2 seconds in the sun is over, bunch of wishy washy pillocks
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
The Moon Under Water has changed a bit since old George's day.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
I observe that those wanting to dissuade people from doing to university are almost always graduates themselves and don't think their own children should be restricted from university.
"Putting some perspective on Britain’s bad markets week: At times like these, it’s worth remembering just how bad Kwasi Kwarteng was as chancellor", by Louis Ashworth, Financial Times, January 10 2025
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
In the age of popular democracy, deference to authority gone, social mobility and visibility of issues…. It’s the end of tribal voting and people want solutions.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
For all the justified criticism of Labour, particularly during the Corbyn era and Blair's international expansionism wars, I am not sure that is the most compelling claim, unless you bring in the notion that othering asylum seekers, benefit claimants and specific racial and religious groups is the desire of working Britains.
Is it in the interests of working class communities to have their local hotel filled with male asylum seekers?
What difference does it make to the community?
Don't you think that a large amount of male asylum seekers with nothing to do and no means of legitimately earning money is going to be a problem?
Isn't the solution to sort them out a means of earning a living? I realise they might try and bring their 'other halves' over here, but they might well work, too.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
No offence taken.
I think of your declarations as being an elephant of opinion balanced on a toadstool of anecdata, looking through a narrow aperture telescope - so I'm quite happy to discount 90% of them and accept that you have pointed your telescope in my direction today. Tomorrow you'll be looking somewhere else.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
I can't see how having two right-wing parties as government and opposition would be sustainable. There are millions of voters who'd want to vote for a centre-left party and I'm not sure that even if the Tories were led Rory Stewart or David Gauke it would be enough for them. There are things I want the state to do that neither Rory or Gauke would. Yes, Reform might take a bunch of Labour redwall seats, but you'd actually need another centre-left party to come to the fore for Labour to be replaced. Either that, or maybe have Labour and the Lib Dems merge.
This is why despite it's struggles, barring an absolute calamity (which is of course not out of the question - and whther or not is their fault will be blamed), I think Labour will win the next election. They're simply fishing in a larger pool with no direct national, as opposed to regional, competitors. Even then, the Lib Dems are happy to complement rather than rival Labour due to where their target seats are.
Whereas Reform and the Tories are in the unenviable position of being national competitors representing two very distinct right-wing traditions, even if the Tories are deserting one in a doomed attempt to copy the other.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Ditto in a ward here. Our challenge was Labour (in an ex Labour seat gone LD). It is now going to be Reform as the challenger.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
The debt is not really a debt but rather a tax we have decided to impose. It isn’t a necessity. In my view a better educated workforce is a good thing, regardless of whether a job “requires” a degree. A plumber who has a better and broader understanding of engineering or an electrician who has a better and broader understanding of electronics is not a bad thing.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
Discussion of fossils in Argentina is the kind of thing I used to go for on Twitter. Bluesky isn't as good as Twitter was then for actual knowledge but it is a hell of a lot better than X is now
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
You offer Reform ( with evidence) and the Tories ( without evidence) as the big two parties after the imminent death of Labour.
Now you may be correct that Labour 's fate is sealed and they are finished after an unbroken 28 years of mismanaging the economy, but you seem to ignore who fills that vacuum, assuming it is Reform and the Conservatives.
With a moribund Labour Party I won't be voting for Farage or an even more extreme Jenrick. It might be the LDs or it might be a resurrected "Change UK". I doubt I am alone.
I'm arguing that the Tories themselves will become the equivalent of a resurrected Change UK. Perhaps Anna Soubry will even rejoin them.
They will be the default choice for people who don't want Reform and don't want to waste their votes.
Is that likely when Badenoch, Jenrick and Braverman are ramping up the racist themes with more mainstream Tories like Cleverly hanging on their coat tails? Or are you assuming all the whack-jobs leave for Reform?That being so and the Conservative brand in the toilet why even keep the name? Certainly one wouldn't use it without a qualifying prefix like, New, Democratic, Liberal, One Nation, or Nice (Not Nasty).
Presumably those of us - that small lingering minority of, currently, 50% of the electorate - too stupid and behind the times to fall in with the new anti-woke duopoly will somehow be disenfranchised so that our stupid views don’t get an airing.
A bit tricky when neither of the duopoly are in power and the next general election will be after Trump has completed his second term. But no doubt it’s being worked on as we speak.
I do find William's posts fascinating. I tend to scroll past most of the right wing hardliners and the "Reeves is shit" posters, but there is often some compelling other worldly reasoning for his wild narratives.
Feck the woke twats , their 2 seconds in the sun is over, bunch of wishy washy pillocks
A bit like the Scottish Nationalists then?
Surely you limit your range of fecking if you only feck woke twats? Do you not want to feck all the twats that aren't woke. Btw some of those woke twats are NOT twats: I hope you have taken this into account. Su
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
I don't dispute any of that. Although I believe anyone who wants to experience the social and networking benefits of university should be allowed to do so. I also don't believe a university degree should necessarily directly lead to a career. Mine was straight politics which is neither use nor ornament, but I would feel short changed if I hadn't been allowed to go.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
The C*****n thing looks pretty weird. Which normal person let alone a public figure posts porn on their social media? Either he was the dumbest, most arrogant twat going (a live possibility) who thought he could get away with anything, or *insert conspiracy theory*. Predictably the blood libel types are going a bit mental while the lads who always take the 'its all antisemitism' line are so far quiet.
It's not just the porn posts, it's the constant posting of offers for sex. He didn't care or thought he could get away with it.
This isn't new and it's not a conspiracy theory. It's how long this and other behaviours have been going on and who has been, at best, ignoring it. It's going to be ugly.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
You offer Reform ( with evidence) and the Tories ( without evidence) as the big two parties after the imminent death of Labour.
Now you may be correct that Labour 's fate is sealed and they are finished after an unbroken 28 years of mismanaging the economy, but you seem to ignore who fills that vacuum, assuming it is Reform and the Conservatives.
With a moribund Labour Party I won't be voting for Farage or an even more extreme Jenrick. It might be the LDs or it might be a resurrected "Change UK". I doubt I am alone.
I'm arguing that the Tories themselves will become the equivalent of a resurrected Change UK. Perhaps Anna Soubry will even rejoin them.
They will be the default choice for people who don't want Reform and don't want to waste their votes.
Is that likely when Badenoch, Jenrick and Braverman are ramping up the racist themes with more mainstream Tories like Cleverly hanging on their coat tails? Or are you assuming all the whack-jobs leave for Reform?That being so and the Conservative brand in the toilet why even keep the name? Certainly one wouldn't use it without a qualifying prefix like, New, Democratic, Liberal, One Nation, or Nice (Not Nasty).
Presumably those of us - that small lingering minority of, currently, 50% of the electorate - too stupid and behind the times to fall in with the new anti-woke duopoly will somehow be disenfranchised so that our stupid views don’t get an airing.
A bit tricky when neither of the duopoly are in power and the next general election will be after Trump has completed his second term. But no doubt it’s being worked on as we speak.
I do find William's posts fascinating. I tend to scroll past most of the right wing hardliners and the "Reeves is shit" posters, but there is often some compelling other worldly reasoning for his wild narratives.
Feck the woke twats , their 2 seconds in the sun is over, bunch of wishy washy pillocks
A bit like the Scottish Nationalists then?
Surely you limit your range of fecking if you only feck woke twats? Do you not want to feck all the twats that aren't woke. Btw some of those woke twats are NOT twats: I hope you have taken this into account. Su
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
Chacon a son gout.
The crazy pub you describe is for people so anaesthetised by a frenetic life that they need massively increasing amounts of stimulation. I'm not pointing the finger.
The library is for people who enjoy a good snooze.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
For all the justified criticism of Labour, particularly during the Corbyn era and Blair's international expansionism wars, I am not sure that is the most compelling claim, unless you bring in the notion that othering asylum seekers, benefit claimants and specific racial and religious groups is the desire of working Britains.
Is it in the interests of working class communities to have their local hotel filled with male asylum seekers?
It's a very interesting, yet parochial question. If you travel extensively in Europe you will see parts of Italy where there are no white faces. They tend to be the agricultural areas of the south where the necessity of labour (any labour) to tend the fields using quite outdated equipment allows us to enjoy our avocadoes and vine tomatoes.
Or some of the orange groves in Greece where the accommodation I've seen there is on a par with the unhygienic immigrant dorms in Saudi.
Some parts of Northern Spain which I visit regularly as I have family there, there is a noticeable increase in young males some of whom have some high end technology which might indicate a black market trade in goods sold on the streets there. Simply complaining about (I assume) the 'wrong sort' being on the streets near you doesn't actually address the issue of how and why these flows happen. And how to organise, or accommodate, or reduce the flows.
Using the issue as dog whistle politics is not going to address the issue as its larger than just the UK.
I highly doubt the LDs would demand the EU rejoins the full EU even if they hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. Most likely their red line would be the UK rejoins the single market (as well as a Labour minority government restores agricultural property relief in full and reverses the winter fuel allowance cuts) and there would be no second referendum needed to rejoin the EEA as it would still be Brexit just an ultra soft Brexit.
There is of course zero chance of Canadians becoming the 51st state even if Denmark agreed to hand over Greenland to the USA. A recent Leger poll found 82% of Canadians do not want to become Americans and a mere 13% of Canadians do want to become a US state. Figures so overwhelming even Canadian Conservative leader Poilievre has made clear Canada should stay independent let alone the Liberals and NDP.
Only in Alberta is there any real support for joining the USA but even there only 19% of Albertans wish to become the 51st state
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
The debt is not really a debt but rather a tax we have decided to impose. It isn’t a necessity. In my view a better educated workforce is a good thing, regardless of whether a job “requires” a degree. A plumber who has a better and broader understanding of engineering or an electrician who has a better and broader understanding of electronics is not a bad thing.
That's even worse, taxes shouldn't be discriminatory, everyone on the same income should have the same tax rate.
We should abolish both the graduate tax and National Insurance and have a solitary, identical income tax rate paid by all people on the same income regardless of how they earn their income or how old they are.
Yes I am fully aware that would screw over myself and my peers who have both paid our own fees and then would be liable for a higher rate of tax again under my proposal. But it's still the right thing to do, even if I suffer for it. My generation has been screwed at every turn so it would be par for the course.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
Think more about transferring the existing system into a merge system.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
The debt is not really a debt but rather a tax we have decided to impose. It isn’t a necessity. In my view a better educated workforce is a good thing, regardless of whether a job “requires” a degree. A plumber who has a better and broader understanding of engineering or an electrician who has a better and broader understanding of electronics is not a bad thing.
That's even worse, taxes shouldn't be discriminatory, everyone on the same income should have the same tax rate.
We should abolish both the graduate tax and National Insurance and have a solitary, identical income tax rate paid by all people on the same income regardless of how they earn their income or how old they are.
Yes I am fully aware that would screw over myself and my peers who have both paid our own fees and then would be liable for a higher rate of tax again under my proposal. But it's still the right thing to do, even if I suffer for it. My generation has been screwed at every turn so it would be par for the course.
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. I also favour the abolition of NI and the graduate “tax” although full disclosure I would benefit as I still have plenty of student debt 15 years after I first went to university. I think I pay £300 a month now on PAYE
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
And then the inner workings of social media distort things in two bad ways
First is the "promotion by engagement" algorithm, which means that those who command attention her more than their fair share of airtime. Nothing new there- phone-in radio has depended on it forever. But it does mean that our window on the world is distorted.
On top of that, you now have the pay for promotion thing. In the pub analogy, it's as if the A Prayer and A Pint theology discussion group, sat in the same corner they have occupied for years, are now being interrupted by the landlord and some fairly scary-looking weirdos.
It may be exciting, but that's not automatically good.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
It's also just, for me, healthier. I used to love Twitter for the reasons Leon states. You could get into an intellectual brawl with people, find out fascinating things from different perspectives.
But it's become just a rage machine designed to foment anger from a certain perspective and push certain views in your face. It has become, IMV, crushingly dull, in the way being lectured by the drunken pub bore is. He thinks he's fantastically interesting and for one night he might be. But day after day it's utterly tedious and not good for your health.
Now BlueSky has its issues but thanks to the lack of algorithms in your following feed it really is as interesting as you want to make it.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Hmm. Colour me skeptical.
Any case, William, I am not a "20th century relic". Please retract or face a period of being ignored.
The rise in the minimum wage ahead of inflation or earnings in general probably does account for the bottom sector - or at least, those in work - maintaining their share.
But what the raw figures don't take account of is things like housing costs also running ahead of general inflation. A more meaningful set of figures would be how shares of disposable income has changed over time, or where income is going for each group.
And wealth. You have to look at both P/L and Balance Sheet to assess financial status.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
I don't dispute any of that. Although I believe anyone who wants to experience the social and networking benefits of university should be allowed to do so. I also don't believe a university degree should necessarily directly lead to a career. Mine was straight politics which is neither use nor ornament, but I would feel short changed if I hadn't been allowed to go.
You are assuming that only the arts can lead to ornamental degrees.
Worked with one developer who did medicine at University (graduated) before changing to IT. So his degree was fairly ornamental, as it turned out.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
It's also just, for me, healthier. I used to love Twitter for the reasons Leon states. You could get into an intellectual brawl with people, find out fascinating things from different perspectives.
But it's become just a rage machine designed to foment anger from a certain perspective and push certain views in your face. It has become, IMV, crushingly dull, in the way being lectured by the drunken pub bore is. He thinks he's fantastically interesting and for one night he might be. But day after day it's utterly tedious and not good for your health.
Now BlueSky has its issues but thanks to the lack of algorithms in your following feed it really is as interesting as you want to make it.
Indeed. Yesterday Twitted was dominated by a vast promotion for a Trump campaign documentary, and, globally a big range of rightwing or ultra-right promoted trends and tags.
One thing that I find quite amusing about Twatter vs Blueesky (though in reality it's not a competition except amongst people who feel threatened) is that the trend to Bluesky has a positive and negative driver, and a sheet anchor.
On the one hand people are attracted to a place where they are not fed inflammatory, or made up, garbage by an angry 14-year old, and where they can have fairly adult conversations.
On the other there is a pressure to stay on Twatter, as that's where people still gather.
Overall I'd say that Musk is slowly washing away the sandcastle he's standing on.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
In the age of popular democracy, deference to authority gone, social mobility and visibility of issues…. It’s the end of tribal voting and people want solutions.
I was having a discussion along these lines with a friend last night.
Far from likely, but it is possible that the US suddenly becomes a bit of an Empire builder - gobbling up Canada and other places. China would clearly take the opportunity to take Taiwan, and no doubt other places too. All in the name of strategic interests. Russia may well be first on the path if they get some sort of concession as to sphere-of-interest in return for peace in Ukraine.
So the EU and the other bits of Europe find themselves somewhat squeezed together. Would it actually be wise though for the UK to throw its lot in with the troubles of a greater Europe though? Personally I think it would be deeply unwise. A union of such disparate states isn't going to be terribly stable or likely to follow a predictable path in times of a multi-way race to new Empire.
Obviously all wild speculation, but I do think that rejoining the EU isn't as likely as some think.
China appears to be building 5 large landing ships designed for heavy vehicles:
The next half decade is going to be eventful, I think.
First question is what happens in the first couple of months of the new US administration once they actually have power. Project 2025 implied a huge amount of work to change the foundations of the US constitution, governance and legal system within weeks. A sort of blitzkrieg. Will it happen, or was it all bluster? If it does, then some of those other things we’re currently dismissing, like coercive annexation of Greenland, become just that bit less fantastical. And the US withdrawing wholly or partly from NATO.
Then we have the upcoming US-Russian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Ukraine. Followed presumably by a humiliating capitulation imposed on Kyiv and the removal of Zelenskyy. And the interesting reaction we’re likely to see in Poland and the Baltics. Followed, not long after, by either a further tightening of Moscow’s grip on Georgia or a second invasion if things don’t go as planned.
Finally the long-heralded Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Is this the moment Trump finds himself in Stalin’s situation during Barbarossa and has to rethink his allegiances? Or do they take it, with the minimum of fuss?
FWIW I'd see both Taiwan and Ukraine as modelling their future substantially on Israel - self-reliant and independent, knowing that that almost no one else will wade knee-deep in blood on their behalf even if support is offered.
Trump, and most of the previous 44 previous US Presidents, have demonstrated that USA interests always come first by a very large margin.
I think Eastern Europe and Northern Europe knows most of that, and Western Europe needs to remember things that it has temporarily forgotten.
Israel may see itself as self-reliant, but it relies heavily on US support.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
Think more about transferring the existing system into a merge system.
Your CORGI counts towards your degree…
To what end?
A CORGI certificate is an end of itself, it means whoever holds it is certified to do the work and will not invalidate insurance by having someone unqualified do the job.
Getting Universities to add their overheads onto Corgi would serve what purpose?
It's not as if people who are Corgi certified but without letters after their name have done especially badly in recent decades. They've actually done better without the overheads, not worse.
Your solution is the embodiment of the worst of the process state you normally rail against: "this system we've invested in isn't working, I know let's double down on it, that will fix it."
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
Sounds like Camden in the '80s, as I remember it
I once got throttled in a Camden pub. I beat this guy at pool with a full fluent clearance and kind of 'over celebrated', a bit like Tom Cruise in Color of Money. Turned out this guy was a 'face' who'd just got out of prison. If I hadn't had my g/f with me I think he might have been on his way back there.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Surely Corbyn has already been the socialist Farage?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
Sounds like Camden in the '80s, as I remember it
I once got throttled in a Camden pub. I beat this guy at pool with a full fluent clearance and kind of 'over celebrated', a bit like Tom Cruise in Color of Money. Turned out this guy was a 'face' who'd just got out of prison. If I hadn't had my g/f with me I think he might have been on his way back there.
Good to hear you got out the end ! I remember a mixture of good and bad, a Withnail and I paradise of idealists and small-time crooks.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
And then the inner workings of social media distort things in two bad ways
First is the "promotion by engagement" algorithm, which means that those who command attention her more than their fair share of airtime. Nothing new there- phone-in radio has depended on it forever. But it does mean that our window on the world is distorted.
On top of that, you now have the pay for promotion thing. In the pub analogy, it's as if the A Prayer and A Pint theology discussion group, sat in the same corner they have occupied for years, are now being interrupted by the landlord and some fairly scary-looking weirdos.
It may be exciting, but that's not automatically good.
That is the key difference between Bluesky and Twitter or Instagram. You choose who you engage with, but you won't get an interesting engagement unless you put the effort into following them. Hence the starter packs.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
Sounds like Camden in the '80s, as I remember it
I once got throttled in a Camden pub. I beat this guy at pool with a full fluent clearance and kind of 'over celebrated', a bit like Tom Cruise in Color of Money. Turned out this guy was a 'face' who'd just got out of prison. If I hadn't had my g/f with me I think he might have been on his way back there.
Never play pool with strangers in pubs is advice my old dad used to give. Some people really can't stand losing.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
Sounds like Camden in the '80s, as I remember it
I once got throttled in a Camden pub. I beat this guy at pool with a full fluent clearance and kind of 'over celebrated', a bit like Tom Cruise in Color of Money. Turned out this guy was a 'face' who'd just got out of prison. If I hadn't had my g/f with me I think he might have been on his way back there.
Never play pool with strangers in pubs is advice my old dad used to give. Some people really can't stand losing.
'Never play with strangers in pubs' sounds like good advice to avoid an STI as well.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
Is that based on the damage their graduates cost the economy?
I was having a discussion along these lines with a friend last night.
Far from likely, but it is possible that the US suddenly becomes a bit of an Empire builder - gobbling up Canada and other places. China would clearly take the opportunity to take Taiwan, and no doubt other places too. All in the name of strategic interests. Russia may well be first on the path if they get some sort of concession as to sphere-of-interest in return for peace in Ukraine.
So the EU and the other bits of Europe find themselves somewhat squeezed together. Would it actually be wise though for the UK to throw its lot in with the troubles of a greater Europe though? Personally I think it would be deeply unwise. A union of such disparate states isn't going to be terribly stable or likely to follow a predictable path in times of a multi-way race to new Empire.
Obviously all wild speculation, but I do think that rejoining the EU isn't as likely as some think.
China appears to be building 5 large landing ships designed for heavy vehicles:
The next half decade is going to be eventful, I think.
First question is what happens in the first couple of months of the new US administration once they actually have power. Project 2025 implied a huge amount of work to change the foundations of the US constitution, governance and legal system within weeks. A sort of blitzkrieg. Will it happen, or was it all bluster? If it does, then some of those other things we’re currently dismissing, like coercive annexation of Greenland, become just that bit less fantastical. And the US withdrawing wholly or partly from NATO.
Then we have the upcoming US-Russian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Ukraine. Followed presumably by a humiliating capitulation imposed on Kyiv and the removal of Zelenskyy. And the interesting reaction we’re likely to see in Poland and the Baltics. Followed, not long after, by either a further tightening of Moscow’s grip on Georgia or a second invasion if things don’t go as planned.
Finally the long-heralded Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Is this the moment Trump finds himself in Stalin’s situation during Barbarossa and has to rethink his allegiances? Or do they take it, with the minimum of fuss?
FWIW I'd see both Taiwan and Ukraine as modelling their future substantially on Israel - self-reliant and independent, knowing that that almost no one else will wade knee-deep in blood on their behalf even if support is offered.
Trump, and most of the previous 44 previous US Presidents, have demonstrated that USA interests always come first by a very large margin.
I think Eastern Europe and Northern Europe knows most of that, and Western Europe needs to remember things that it has temporarily forgotten.
Israel may see itself as self-reliant, but it relies heavily on US support.
It relies on US support, obviously as it's easier. But not as much as you might think or even 20 or 30 years ago given the size of its arms industry. They could probably rejig more easily to not relying on the US than we could given their needs and capabilities.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
Is that based on the damage their graduates cost the economy?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or we need to do the polar opposite.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
The debt is not really a debt but rather a tax we have decided to impose. It isn’t a necessity. In my view a better educated workforce is a good thing, regardless of whether a job “requires” a degree. A plumber who has a better and broader understanding of engineering or an electrician who has a better and broader understanding of electronics is not a bad thing.
Although its not necessary to have the traditional, formal and expensive way of getting that broader understanding.
In some areas I've learnt more from YouTube than from academic courses.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
: Senior government sources claim Dominic Cummings is coordinating Elon Musk’s social media attacks on British politicians, including Keir Starmer, via WhatsApp
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
True but if Starmer's government hadn't been so crap they wouldn't have seen a 7% decline in their voteshare less than a year after their landslide general election win either.
Blair's government for example got a far higher voteshare in 1997 than Starmer did and about as many MPs but 6 months after the 1997 GE was polling even higher than it had got at that election
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
I was having a discussion along these lines with a friend last night.
Far from likely, but it is possible that the US suddenly becomes a bit of an Empire builder - gobbling up Canada and other places. China would clearly take the opportunity to take Taiwan, and no doubt other places too. All in the name of strategic interests. Russia may well be first on the path if they get some sort of concession as to sphere-of-interest in return for peace in Ukraine.
So the EU and the other bits of Europe find themselves somewhat squeezed together. Would it actually be wise though for the UK to throw its lot in with the troubles of a greater Europe though? Personally I think it would be deeply unwise. A union of such disparate states isn't going to be terribly stable or likely to follow a predictable path in times of a multi-way race to new Empire.
Obviously all wild speculation, but I do think that rejoining the EU isn't as likely as some think.
China appears to be building 5 large landing ships designed for heavy vehicles:
The next half decade is going to be eventful, I think.
First question is what happens in the first couple of months of the new US administration once they actually have power. Project 2025 implied a huge amount of work to change the foundations of the US constitution, governance and legal system within weeks. A sort of blitzkrieg. Will it happen, or was it all bluster? If it does, then some of those other things we’re currently dismissing, like coercive annexation of Greenland, become just that bit less fantastical. And the US withdrawing wholly or partly from NATO.
Then we have the upcoming US-Russian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Ukraine. Followed presumably by a humiliating capitulation imposed on Kyiv and the removal of Zelenskyy. And the interesting reaction we’re likely to see in Poland and the Baltics. Followed, not long after, by either a further tightening of Moscow’s grip on Georgia or a second invasion if things don’t go as planned.
Finally the long-heralded Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Is this the moment Trump finds himself in Stalin’s situation during Barbarossa and has to rethink his allegiances? Or do they take it, with the minimum of fuss?
FWIW I'd see both Taiwan and Ukraine as modelling their future substantially on Israel - self-reliant and independent, knowing that that almost no one else will wade knee-deep in blood on their behalf even if support is offered.
Trump, and most of the previous 44 previous US Presidents, have demonstrated that USA interests always come first by a very large margin.
I think Eastern Europe and Northern Europe knows most of that, and Western Europe needs to remember things that it has temporarily forgotten.
Israel may see itself as self-reliant, but it relies heavily on US support.
It relies on US support, obviously as it's easier. But not as much as you might think or even 20 or 30 years ago given the size of its arms industry. They could probably rejig more easily to not relying on the US than we could given their needs and capabilities.
It’s not just military support. There’s a lot of economic support from people in the US.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
To be fair only PPE graduates who focus on the Economics in their final year really go onto make a fortune, not those who focus on the Politics or Philosophy.
Rishi earnt far more at Goldman Sacks as an analyst and then in the hedge fund world than he did as an MP or even as a Cabinet Minister and PM. He also therefore built up more assets and savings than ex PPE SPADs and researchers like Cameron and the Milibands did before becoming MPs
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
True but if Starmer's government hadn't been so crap they wouldn't have seen a 7% decline in their voteshare less than a year after their landslide general election win either.
Blair's government for example got a far higher voteshare in 1997 than Starmer did and about as many MPs but 6 months after the 1997 GE was polling even higher than it had got at that election
They haven’t seen a 7% decline in their vote share. They’ve seen a 7% decline in their polling, which isn’t quite the same thing.
I think both your facts say more about changes in polling volatility since the ‘90s than anything else.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law Computer Science and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
To be fair only PPE graduates who focus on the Economics in their final year really go onto make a fortune, not those who focus on the Politics or Philosophy.
Rishi earnt far more at Goldman Sacks as an analyst and then in the hedge fund world than he did as an MP or even as a Cabinet Minister and PM. He also therefore built up more assets and savings than ex PPE SPADs and researchers like Cameron and the Milibands did before becoming MPs
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
True but if Starmer's government hadn't been so crap they wouldn't have seen a 7% decline in their voteshare...
Seven percentage points, not seven percent.
Seven percentage point drop looks like this: 30% to 23% Seven percent drop looks like this: 30% to 27.9%
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Surely Corbyn has already been the socialist Farage?
To an extent, yes. But his head was in the past and he wasn't the brightest. Nevertheless he got close in 2017 and this shows the possibilities for a radical left alternative to "managed decline" or xenophobic insularity. I'd be conflicted if something like that emerged with a high quality leader full of principles and with a good heart. My main concern in politics is that we don't succumb to right wing national populism. I'm then not too fussed about radical left vs managed decline. I like both of those.
I was having a discussion along these lines with a friend last night.
Far from likely, but it is possible that the US suddenly becomes a bit of an Empire builder - gobbling up Canada and other places. China would clearly take the opportunity to take Taiwan, and no doubt other places too. All in the name of strategic interests. Russia may well be first on the path if they get some sort of concession as to sphere-of-interest in return for peace in Ukraine.
So the EU and the other bits of Europe find themselves somewhat squeezed together. Would it actually be wise though for the UK to throw its lot in with the troubles of a greater Europe though? Personally I think it would be deeply unwise. A union of such disparate states isn't going to be terribly stable or likely to follow a predictable path in times of a multi-way race to new Empire.
Obviously all wild speculation, but I do think that rejoining the EU isn't as likely as some think.
China appears to be building 5 large landing ships designed for heavy vehicles:
The next half decade is going to be eventful, I think.
First question is what happens in the first couple of months of the new US administration once they actually have power. Project 2025 implied a huge amount of work to change the foundations of the US constitution, governance and legal system within weeks. A sort of blitzkrieg. Will it happen, or was it all bluster? If it does, then some of those other things we’re currently dismissing, like coercive annexation of Greenland, become just that bit less fantastical. And the US withdrawing wholly or partly from NATO.
Then we have the upcoming US-Russian Molotov-Ribbentrop pact over Ukraine. Followed presumably by a humiliating capitulation imposed on Kyiv and the removal of Zelenskyy. And the interesting reaction we’re likely to see in Poland and the Baltics. Followed, not long after, by either a further tightening of Moscow’s grip on Georgia or a second invasion if things don’t go as planned.
Finally the long-heralded Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Is this the moment Trump finds himself in Stalin’s situation during Barbarossa and has to rethink his allegiances? Or do they take it, with the minimum of fuss?
FWIW I'd see both Taiwan and Ukraine as modelling their future substantially on Israel - self-reliant and independent, knowing that that almost no one else will wade knee-deep in blood on their behalf even if support is offered.
Trump, and most of the previous 44 previous US Presidents, have demonstrated that USA interests always come first by a very large margin.
I think Eastern Europe and Northern Europe knows most of that, and Western Europe needs to remember things that it has temporarily forgotten.
Israel may see itself as self-reliant, but it relies heavily on US support.
It relies on US support, obviously as it's easier. But not as much as you might think or even 20 or 30 years ago given the size of its arms industry. They could probably rejig more easily to not relying on the US than we could given their needs and capabilities.
It’s not just military support. There’s a lot of economic support from people in the US.
And? All economies other than autarkies rely on outside investment to some extent.
Seems the Brentwood area of Los Angles now under threat from wildfires.
we've been reporting, parts of the upscale area of Brentwood are under evacuation orders after becoming threatened by the spreading Palisades Fire.
Among those who are reported to have homes in the suburb are US Vice-President Kamala Harris, basketball star LeBron James, actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and rapper and producer Dr. Dre.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Surely Corbyn has already been the socialist Farage?
To an extent, yes. But his head was in the past and he wasn't the brightest. Nevertheless he got close in 2017 and this shows the possibilities for a radical left alternative to "managed decline" or xenophobic insularity. I'd be conflicted if something like that emerged with a high quality leader full of principles and with a good heart. My main concern in politics is that we don't succumb to right wing national populism. I'm then not too fussed about radical left vs managed decline. I like both of those.
So we have already tried radical left from 2015 to 2020 with Corbyn led Labour and though it got close in 2017 it failed.
Now we are trying radical right with Farage and Reform and will see how far it gets
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
No, fees should be based on the average graduate earnings premium they give primarily as those course with the highest earnings premium will have the highest demand and also be most affordable to pay back, with the remainder of fees being highest for courses which cost the most to run.
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
Meta has "no plans to end fact-checking in the EU", the company clarified and "will review its EU content moderation obligations before making changes"
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
True but if Starmer's government hadn't been so crap they wouldn't have seen a 7% decline in their voteshare...
Seven percentage points, not seven percent.
Seven percentage point drop looks like this: 30% to 23% Seven percent drop looks like this: 30% to 27.9%
If you wish to be pedantic yes but either way it has declined in polled voteshare and projected seats because it has been crap
Mel Stride had the mother of all shit interviews on Camilla Tominey. He actually refused to call for Rachel Reeves' resignation and said 'It's a matter for the Prime Minister' like he was some sort of junior Government spokesperson. Tominey was gobsmacked. How can the Tories take a great opportunity like that and instead make the interview all about how shit they are?
It's also notable that since the Tories have no economic policies of their own, he was stuck telling Tominey how great Hunt's policies were not what the Tories would actually do. That isn't Stride's fault, it's Kemi's moronic 2 year no policy policy.
Sodding well improve you bunch of absolute muppets.
I observe that those wanting to dissuade people from doing to university are almost always graduates themselves and don't think their own children should be restricted from university.
A rich variety of apparently useless subjects is one of the marks of an interesting university community. There is, I suggest, a close relationship between how many apparently useless but rigorous subjects are offered and the number of people who want to enter that university (though mostly for ostensibly 'useful' subjects) and how hard it is to get in.
Universities specialising in useless and non-rigorous subjects are a different animal altogether.
: Senior government sources claim Dominic Cummings is coordinating Elon Musk’s social media attacks on British politicians, including Keir Starmer, via WhatsApp
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Surely Corbyn has already been the socialist Farage?
To an extent, yes. But his head was in the past and he wasn't the brightest. Nevertheless he got close in 2017 and this shows the possibilities for a radical left alternative to "managed decline" or xenophobic insularity. I'd be conflicted if something like that emerged with a high quality leader full of principles and with a good heart. My main concern in politics is that we don't succumb to right wing national populism. I'm then not too fussed about radical left vs managed decline. I like both of those.
Honestly think a combination of nationalism with forcible redistribution of wealth would be popular now.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
What kind of person doesn’t want heroin, jelly shots, low cost stabbing and semi-demi-fascism in their pub?
Sounds like Camden in the '80s, as I remember it
I once got throttled in a Camden pub. I beat this guy at pool with a full fluent clearance and kind of 'over celebrated', a bit like Tom Cruise in Color of Money. Turned out this guy was a 'face' who'd just got out of prison. If I hadn't had my g/f with me I think he might have been on his way back there.
Never play pool with strangers in pubs is advice my old dad used to give. Some people really can't stand losing.
Good advice - which I followed after that episode.
Although the pub pool scene has pretty much gone now.
Seems the Brentwood area of Los Angles now under threat from wildfires.
we've been reporting, parts of the upscale area of Brentwood are under evacuation orders after becoming threatened by the spreading Palisades Fire.
Among those who are reported to have homes in the suburb are US Vice-President Kamala Harris, basketball star LeBron James, actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and rapper and producer Dr. Dre.
The MAGA nut jobs will be praying for Kamala's house to burn down.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
It seems odd to dictate that only those 4 universities should be able to charge more. I would’ve thought that, as a Conservative, you would support a free market where every university can decide what to charge.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
No, fees should be based on the average graduate earnings premium they give primarily as those course with the highest earnings premium will have the highest demand and also be most affordable to pay back, with the remainder of fees being highest for courses which cost the most to run.
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
Law graduates, for example, don’t all go work in the City. They could just as easily be working on the high street in Norwich for £30k.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law Computer Science and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
One issue here is that that £9k has been allowed to whither on the vine.
It has been fixed in cash terms since 2018. Since then CPI inflation has been 27.6%, and it is a real terms cut in resource of the same factor.
That is surely just one more aspect of national life, amongst many others, which were allowed by the previous Govt to go to hell in a handcart. They were quite happy to starve resources, and force public sector bodies to feed off reserves and the equivalent of muscle. That's just not responsible Government, and to do that and then complain is perverse, imo.
Now we have a Government, all that needs to be addressed.
How is inflation-linking handled in other countries?
Comments
From you, that description probably encompasses over half the globe.
Any case, William, I am not a "20th century relic". Please retract or face a period of being ignored.
Predictably the blood libel types are going a bit mental while the lads who always take the 'its all antisemitism' line are so far quiet.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
But what the raw figures don't take account of is things like housing costs also running ahead of general inflation. A more meaningful set of figures would be how shares of disposable income has changed over time, or where income is going for each group.
Hmmmm - leading politician. So probability 80%+
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate.
Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate.
These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
https://www.ft.com/content/7c41dc11-8227-404d-8629-ae7dca82d0b8
I think of your declarations as being an elephant of opinion balanced on a toadstool of anecdata, looking through a narrow aperture telescope - so I'm quite happy to discount 90% of them and accept that you have pointed your telescope in my direction today. Tomorrow you'll be looking somewhere else.
But you know that !
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Whereas Reform and the Tories are in the unenviable position of being national competitors representing two very distinct right-wing traditions, even if the Tories are deserting one in a doomed attempt to copy the other.
Making jobs that never relied upon degrees rely upon degrees has only left people with more debt and no better options or income, so your solution is to get even more people to tie their training to universities?
I can see how that would enrich the University sector while impoverishing another group of people forced to pay universities for no return but why would you want to do that?
Su
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
This isn't new and it's not a conspiracy theory. It's how long this and other behaviours have been going on and who has been, at best, ignoring it. It's going to be ugly.
The crazy pub you describe is for people so anaesthetised by a frenetic life that they need massively increasing amounts of stimulation. I'm not pointing the finger.
The library is for people who enjoy a good snooze.
Or some of the orange groves in Greece where the accommodation I've seen there is on a par with the unhygienic immigrant dorms in Saudi.
Some parts of Northern Spain which I visit regularly as I have family there, there is a noticeable increase in young males some of whom have some high end technology which might indicate a black market trade in goods sold on the streets there. Simply complaining about (I assume) the 'wrong sort' being on the streets near you doesn't actually address the issue of how and why these flows happen. And how to organise, or accommodate, or reduce the flows.
Using the issue as dog whistle politics is not going to address the issue as its larger than just the UK.
There is of course zero chance of Canadians becoming the 51st state even if Denmark agreed to hand over Greenland to the USA. A recent Leger poll found 82% of Canadians do not want to become Americans and a mere 13% of Canadians do want to become a US state. Figures so overwhelming even Canadian Conservative leader Poilievre has made clear Canada should stay independent let alone the Liberals and NDP.
Only in Alberta is there any real support for joining the USA but even there only 19% of Albertans wish to become the 51st state
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article298177823.html
We should abolish both the graduate tax and National Insurance and have a solitary, identical income tax rate paid by all people on the same income regardless of how they earn their income or how old they are.
Yes I am fully aware that would screw over myself and my peers who have both paid our own fees and then would be liable for a higher rate of tax again under my proposal. But it's still the right thing to do, even if I suffer for it. My generation has been screwed at every turn so it would be par for the course.
Your CORGI counts towards your degree…
First is the "promotion by engagement" algorithm, which means that those who command attention her more than their fair share of airtime. Nothing new there- phone-in radio has depended on it forever. But it does mean that our window on the world is distorted.
On top of that, you now have the pay for promotion thing. In the pub analogy, it's as if the A Prayer and A Pint theology discussion group, sat in the same corner they have occupied for years, are now being interrupted by the landlord and some fairly scary-looking weirdos.
It may be exciting, but that's not automatically good.
But it's become just a rage machine designed to foment anger from a certain perspective and push certain views in your face. It has become, IMV, crushingly dull, in the way being lectured by the drunken pub bore is. He thinks he's fantastically interesting and for one night he might be. But day after day it's utterly tedious and not good for your health.
Now BlueSky has its issues but thanks to the lack of algorithms in your following feed it really is as interesting as you want to make it.
Worked with one developer who did medicine at University (graduated) before changing to IT. So his degree was fairly ornamental, as it turned out.
Yesterday Twitted was dominated by a vast promotion for a Trump campaign documentary, and, globally a big range of rightwing or ultra-right promoted trends and tags.
On the one hand people are attracted to a place where they are not fed inflammatory, or made up, garbage by an angry 14-year old, and where they can have fairly adult conversations.
On the other there is a pressure to stay on Twatter, as that's where people still gather.
Overall I'd say that Musk is slowly washing away the sandcastle he's standing on.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642
Police fed - 925
NCA - 2395
College of policing - 3923
Moj - 1375
CBA - 4524
Dignity in dying - 8702
Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
A CORGI certificate is an end of itself, it means whoever holds it is certified to do the work and will not invalidate insurance by having someone unqualified do the job.
Getting Universities to add their overheads onto Corgi would serve what purpose?
It's not as if people who are Corgi certified but without letters after their name have done especially badly in recent decades. They've actually done better without the overheads, not worse.
Your solution is the embodiment of the worst of the process state you normally rail against: "this system we've invested in isn't working, I know let's double down on it, that will fix it."
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/mattwardman.bsky.social/3lfk4fvp5yv26
If you ask me to add an account, I'll add it to that one, and we'll see if it appears on both.
In some areas I've learnt more from YouTube than from academic courses.
: Senior government sources claim Dominic Cummings is coordinating Elon Musk’s social media attacks on British politicians, including Keir Starmer, via WhatsApp
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1878215786952581391
Blair's government for example got a far higher voteshare in 1997 than Starmer did and about as many MPs but 6 months after the 1997 GE was polling even higher than it had got at that election
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Rishi earnt far more at Goldman Sacks as an analyst and then in the hedge fund world than he did as an MP or even as a Cabinet Minister and PM. He also therefore built up more assets and savings than ex PPE SPADs and researchers like Cameron and the Milibands did before becoming MPs
I think both your facts say more about changes in polling volatility since the ‘90s than anything else.
Tuition fees in Australia also vary on course and university unlike us and by institution in Ireland too
https://www.studyin-australia.com/study-guide/cost-of-studying-in-australia-for-international-students/
https://www.si-ireland.com/ireland-study-info/tuition-fees-ireland/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-10/mark-zuckerberg-slams-biden-administration-on-joe-rogan-s-podcast
https://archive.is/ugNmr
Do we need a support group?
Seven percentage point drop looks like this: 30% to 23%
Seven percent drop looks like this: 30% to 27.9%
we've been reporting, parts of the upscale area of Brentwood are under evacuation orders after becoming threatened by the spreading Palisades Fire.
Among those who are reported to have homes in the suburb are US Vice-President Kamala Harris, basketball star LeBron James, actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and rapper and producer Dr. Dre.
Now we are trying radical right with Farage and Reform and will see how far it gets
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
https://www.politico.eu/article/mark-zuckerberg-full-elon-musk-dump-facebook-fact-checker/ , via https://bsky.app/profile/mathver.bsky.social/post/3lf7xtxry4c26
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/rachel-reeves-resign-grill-mel-stride-politics
I hate the GBNews site but it's also on Youtube.
It's also notable that since the Tories have no economic policies of their own, he was stuck telling Tominey how great Hunt's policies were not what the Tories would actually do. That isn't Stride's fault, it's Kemi's moronic 2 year no policy policy.
Sodding well improve you bunch of absolute muppets.
Universities specialising in useless and non-rigorous subjects are a different animal altogether.
Although the pub pool scene has pretty much gone now.
Probably Arnie's too.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
It has been fixed in cash terms since 2018. Since then CPI inflation has been 27.6%, and it is a real terms cut in resource of the same factor.
That is surely just one more aspect of national life, amongst many others, which were allowed by the previous Govt to go to hell in a handcart. They were quite happy to starve resources, and force public sector bodies to feed off reserves and the equivalent of muscle. That's just not responsible Government, and to do that and then complain is perverse, imo.
Now we have a Government, all that needs to be addressed.
How is inflation-linking handled in other countries?