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 .
No doubt for now my cause is lost, but the thought that there would subjects where people are encouraged to do them only if they want financial advantage indicates cultural and moral collapse. This triumph of extrinsic over intrinsic value removes a huge amount of what makes living worth the effort.
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.
Electrical? All they do is produce Single Line Diagrams that are unintelligible to the rest of the engineering community.
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
Maggie beat Callaghan by 7% in 1979 and found herself behind Labour straight away. Inheriting a complete mess from an exhausted Government doesn't make for instant popularity.
OTOH Starmer also suffers from being an uninspiring figure whose administration has already squandered a lot of political capital on measures that are simultaneously unpopular and ineffectual, largely thanks to the Treasury. The winter fuel payment decision was a particular own goal: if they were going to thump the wealthy grey vote then they really needed to do it in a way that would raise a lot of money, not with a measure that simultaneously looks heartless and will quite possibly transpire to have been revenue neutral.
You get the overall impression that Labour have some of the right ideas - and they're certainly less malignant than the Conservatives - but they're insufficiently competent and far too timid to effect the scale of change that's needed to refloat our rapidly sinking country. If Starmer survives the next election with a reduced majority, this will most likely be attributable to the manifest uselessness of the rump Tories, allied to Reform hitting its ceiling of support outside of areas that are both poor and white.
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.
Yes. Then, although this could have been me getting older, it seemed like sleaze got the upper hand. So it's off my map now. About the only thing that might get me boozing in Camden Town one more time is the opportunity to give Leon a piece of my mind.
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
Obvious consequence there is that people who go to high-cost universities will be seriously discouraged from the sort of careers that have high social value but relatively low pay.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
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.
The basic problem the Tories have was shown by their ludicrous positioning on grooming gangs but equally goes for this. In that they want to make populist arguments as they find them attractive and are the shortest route to the sugar rush of bashing Labour. But are missing the fact that if you accept the logic of the populist right - that things are crap on any given issue because 'establishment' politicians are in a conspiracy against the public - then they are as implicated as anyone.
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.
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
Obvious consequence there is that people who go to high-cost universities will be seriously discouraged from the sort of careers that have high social value but relatively low pay.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
The C of E would still attract people interested in the "fringe benefits".
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?
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
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.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
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.
One way that Bluesky is particularly good (apart from the obvious advantage of not being forcefed Musk's drug induced paranoid conspiracies or dropshipping adverts) is the feeds functions.
It's great for those of us with multiple interests but not wanting them all in the same feed, keeping politics siloed from film for example. The replies are also interesting and useful rather than blue ticked trolls. It works far better than Xitter lists.
There does seem to be a problem with their servers keeping up with demand from the rapid expansion in numbers joining, and also an increase in usability as it reaches critical mass.
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.
Makes sense to me. Calling for a cabinet minister to resign just because they have done something you disagree with is pretty asinine. Politicians should stop doing it.
And the problem with saying what Labour should have done is... well the question is really about how to fix the mess the Tories left.
And there won't be an election for 4 or 5 years, alternative policies aren't really needed. Maybe some alternative *ideas* but to be honest we are too fixated on parties coming in and and changing stuff, they need fewer policies not 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.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
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
How many PBers have PPE degrees?
Do we need a support group?
No, it’s the rest of us that need a support group. “Victims Of PPE Graduates”
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.
The basic problem the Tories have was shown by their ludicrous positioning on grooming gangs but equally goes for this. In that they want to make populist arguments as they find them attractive and are the shortest route to the sugar rush of bashing Labour. But are missing the fact that if you accept the logic of the populist right - that things are crap on any given issue because 'establishment' politicians are in a conspiracy against the public - then they are as implicated as anyone.
Yes, except that's a load of shite really isn't it?
The Tories call for a public enquiry into grooming looks like the sole popular intervention that Kemi has made so far (hence the fury of those on the left at her for making it), whereas this ludicrous equivocation of Stride getting his jowls in a wobble refusing to say that Reeves isn't up to the job is actually what you want him to do.
'The sugar rush of opposing Labour' is called being an opposition. If Tory supporters here had questioned why Labour was continually bashing the Government instead of attacking the Lib Dems, you'd have thought they were complete loons.
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
A lot of words to say Brexit killed the Tories.
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Brexit really was the death knell, I agree, in that Boris and Truss follow directly from the lurch to populism, grift, and irresponsibility.
Yep. Brexit trashed the Conservative party. It's tempting to claim that as the elusive "tangible benefit" but this would be (i) facetious and (ii) wrong because what's appeared as the likely replacement is none too appetising.
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
Maggie beat Callaghan by 7% in 1979 and found herself behind Labour straight away. Inheriting a complete mess from an exhausted Government doesn't make for instant popularity.
OTOH Starmer also suffers from being an uninspiring figure whose administration has already squandered a lot of political capital on measures that are simultaneously unpopular and ineffectual, largely thanks to the Treasury. The winter fuel payment decision was a particular own goal: if they were going to thump the wealthy grey vote then they really needed to do it in a way that would raise a lot of money, not with a measure that simultaneously looks heartless and will quite possibly transpire to have been revenue neutral.
You get the overall impression that Labour have some of the right ideas - and they're certainly less malignant than the Conservatives - but they're insufficiently competent and far too timid to effect the scale of change that's needed to refloat our rapidly sinking country. If Starmer survives the next election with a reduced majority, this will most likely be attributable to the manifest uselessness of the rump Tories, allied to Reform hitting its ceiling of support outside of areas that are both poor and white.
Starmer will recover his popularity after he has successfully recovered Canada after the US invasion. Well, it worked for Thatcher!
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
A lot of words to say Brexit killed the Tories.
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Brexit really was the death knell, I agree, in that Boris and Truss follow directly from the lurch to populism, grift, and irresponsibility.
You seem to have departed into an extended dream sequence that bears no resemblance to the reality of public opinion, as shown quite clearly by the polling.
It would save you time if you just typed 'I hate Brexit WAAAAHHHHHHHH!' and didn't try to gussy it up as some sort of informed commentary.
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
A lot of words to say Brexit killed the Tories.
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Brexit really was the death knell, I agree, in that Boris and Truss follow directly from the lurch to populism, grift, and irresponsibility.
You seem to have departed into an extended dream sequence that bears no resemblance to the reality of public opinion, as shown quite clearly by the polling.
It would save you time if you just typed 'I hate Brexit WAAAAHHHHHHHH!' and didn't try to gussy it up as some sort of informed commentary.
Yes, no doubt the Tories can revive by spraying rock on fields or some such.
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%
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
There has to be a risk of a fairly major split within the Labour party during the current parliament - choosing a leader who's perceived to be as far out on the fringe of the party as Streeting is exactly the sort of event that would precipitate that.
I can think of maybe 20-25 seats where a soft Corbynite candidate might realistically hope to beat a Streetingist. Might be enough to throw a spanner in the works if one of the right-wing parties were to take a decisive lead over the other during a campaign.
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.
Makes sense to me. Calling for a cabinet minister to resign just because they have done something you disagree with is pretty asinine. Politicians should stop doing it.
And the problem with saying what Labour should have done is... well the question is really about how to fix the mess the Tories left.
And there won't be an election for 4 or 5 years, alternative policies aren't really needed. Maybe some alternative *ideas* but to be honest we are too fixated on parties coming in and and changing stuff, they need fewer policies not more
Then you clearly haven't watched the interview.
Stride could certainly have said 'She has been very poor, but at the moment a resignation would probably further destabilise an already bad situation, so I think she should face the music and fix what she's broken.' - that would at least have been a view. He could also have scored a point saying he wasn't sure who else within Labour would do any better.
What he did do was go in totally unprepared for that question (bizarrely as he'd just penned a Telegraph article on how awful Reeves is), and come out of it like a harassed Government spokesman saying things were 'a matter for the Prime Minister'.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
Moreover, what the Hell does an electable Tory party look like now? Their rump vote of wealthy pensioners will applaud the small state model (provided that the Triple Lock is exempted and punishing austerity is only applied to people under 65,) but it's dead as a doornail so far as most of the rest of the population is concerned. So you're left with the problem that Labour isn't capable of solving: how to find enough money to make everything work again yet still win the next election. Only the Tories are in an even more hopeless position to fix the mess because their core vote is, at once, the largest burden on the state and the ones who are sitting on the bulk of the remaining available resources.
My best guess as things stand is that the major net beneficiaries at the next GE will be Reform. You can quite easily see a moribund Conservative Party shipping almost as many marginal seats to the Liberal Democrats as it manages to win back from Labour.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
A lot of words to say Brexit killed the Tories.
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Brexit really was the death knell, I agree, in that Boris and Truss follow directly from the lurch to populism, grift, and irresponsibility.
You seem to have departed into an extended dream sequence that bears no resemblance to the reality of public opinion, as shown quite clearly by the polling.
It would save you time if you just typed 'I hate Brexit WAAAAHHHHHHHH!' and didn't try to gussy it up as some sort of informed commentary.
Yes, no doubt the Tories can revive by spraying rock on fields or some such.
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.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
A lot of words to say Brexit killed the Tories.
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Brexit really was the death knell, I agree, in that Boris and Truss follow directly from the lurch to populism, grift, and irresponsibility.
You seem to have departed into an extended dream sequence that bears no resemblance to the reality of public opinion, as shown quite clearly by the polling.
It would save you time if you just typed 'I hate Brexit WAAAAHHHHHHHH!' and didn't try to gussy it up as some sort of informed commentary.
It doesn’t matter particularly.
If the Conservatives can’t adapt to the new political order, they’ll be replaced by a party of the right which can.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
The Tories are dead. Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
Moreover, what the Hell does an electable Tory party look like now? Their rump vote of wealthy pensioners will applaud the small state model (provided that the Triple Lock is exempted and punishing austerity is only applied to people under 65,) but it's dead as a doornail so far as most of the rest of the population is concerned. So you're left with the problem that Labour isn't capable of solving: how to find enough money to make everything work again yet still win the next election. Only the Tories are in an even more hopeless position to fix the mess because their core vote is, at once, the largest burden on the state and the ones who are sitting on the bulk of the remaining available resources.
My best guess as things stand is that the major net beneficiaries at the next GE will be Reform. You can quite easily see a moribund Conservative Party shipping almost as many marginal seats to the Liberal Democrats as it manages to win back from Labour.
Worse - I suspect that the Tories won’t win back those seats from Labour, in a lot of those seats Reform will be the beneficiary - the Tories had their chance (in 2019) and failed, Labour failed so let’s try the next option.
Think I’m kidding - I’m just applying what’s happened in Redcar since 2010
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
There will be very few safe Labour seats imo
Within living memory, Ilford North (aka Chez Wes Streeting) was a safe Conservative seat.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
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 note that I’m not in the starter lists and don’t mind being included provided you want a combination of occasional sarcasm and posts about niche employment issues (agency worker payroll) and a particular MS software product
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
No offence, but X is full of people like you, but without the redeeming wit, and occasional flashes of self-awareness.
If bluesky gradually attracts more of the information/news oriented posters, then X will lose half its raison d'être.
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.
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?
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
My view is that it will still be an issue.
I think it’s already slipped down the rankings in salience among the general public, as tends to happen. But it depends what Netanyahu is doing by then, or indeed if he remains in power (seems unlikely, it’s 4+ years away).
Half the city is entirely without power, and plunged into darkness. Dogs wander in the dystopian dark, the only light is from random fires reflected off razor wire
Then on the corner there will be a really chic tapas and wine bar, with excellent pepper sauced ribeye and a good selection of Riojas
Revealing aside from Martin Samuel in the Times this week:
Not least because the newest breed of nepo chefs don’t actually want to be chefs. If Brooklyn fancied work in a professional kitchen, he could get a job in the next ten minutes. Every kitchen has vacancies post-Brexit. And not just menial roles, either. One of my lads came straight out of culinary school into a Jason Atherton restaurant. I imagined him peeling potatoes for six months. “I’m on larder,” he explained, after day one. I thought he meant running errands from the larder. Transpires larder is what laymen call starters. He made them, applied the dressings, arranged the plate. Head chef checked it at the pass. If he was satisfied, Will’s food went out.
So Brooklyn could do that today, if he wished. He could do it at the place where my lad is now head chef.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
It isn't but I don't (at 64) feel the same way. I'm ok if I stay detached and just "interested" - because it's interesting - but at root I'm anxious about how things are going. People in the west are letting themselves down imo. First whiff of reversal after centuries of privilege and domination and they're voting in droves for tinpot Caligulas and Napoleons.
The next election is an interesting case of us not understanding deep time.
Barring catastrophe or some massive polling surge, Labour will go to the polls in 2029. By then
- the Israel-Gaza war will almost certainly be in the past, and Netanyahu is unlikely to be Israeli PM - Trump will have finished his second term. Either the Democrats will be back in, or his acolyte, or he’ll have overturned the constitutional term limits - Le Pen will probably be French president. Zelenskyy almost certainly won’t be Ukraine president - China may have invaded Taiwan - The world economy will be in a very different place. Either better or worse than now, but not the same - Labour’s domestic policies on the NHS, net zero, migration, law and order and a host of other issues will either have succeeded or failed
All of which means the political arguments of today will have little bearing on the results of 2029.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
History suggests that unseating prominent ministers is actually quite difficult. He’s a lot more prominent now, in cabinet, than he was in opposition. Voters like having a ‘big name’ MP. Yes, there was a spirited campaign against him by the pro-Palestinian independent in his seat, but what salience will that issue have come the next GE? Neither the Tories nor LibDems can now win his seat, so excepting another left field independent, he’s completely safe.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
You have to be fairly old and well past your sell by date, to be worrying about stuff like that.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
There will be very few safe Labour seats imo
Within living memory, Ilford North (aka Chez Wes Streeting) was a safe Conservative seat.
More a marginal, it tended to swing to the winning party nationally until 2015 but is now like most London seats safe Labour (at least against the Conservatives)
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.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
It isn't but I don't (at 64) feel the same way. I'm ok if I stay detached and just "interested" - because it's interesting - but at root I'm anxious about how things are going. People in the west are letting themselves down imo. First whiff of reversal after centuries of privilege and domination and they're voting in droves for tinpot Caligulas and Napoleons.
You are a youngster. It will come. You'll relax into it.
You have to admit it is an exciting production. Full of drama and unexpected plot twists. Best time to be alive.
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.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Disagree. In the 90s you could pick up a terrace in the north of england for 40 grand.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
It feels like the March statement is now going to be incredibly important for Labour. If it does result in Reeves having to confirm that the fiscal headroom has gone and cuts will follow, it is going to cause a lot of fallout.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
There will be very few safe Labour seats imo
Within living memory, Ilford North (aka Chez Wes Streeting) was a safe Conservative seat.
It was, back when I took on a safe Tory ward there with a majority of a thousand and flipped it to a LibDem ward with similar majority, and held it for the successive five elections (despite Clegg’s attempt to trash the brand).
But Londoners are relatively youthful and well educated, and the Tories have resolutely turned their back on such folk. The large Jewish population in Ilford North has been on the decline, due to low birth rate and the tendency of their kids to assimilate or move away, while the growing Muslim population of Ilford South has inexorably spread into the roads north of Eastern Avenue. And the Tories’ obsession with Brexit was always aimed at its rural redoubts, rather than people living in the planet’s premier global metropolis.
The Tories misguided repositioning kissed goodbye to winning in London, way back.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Silicon Valley in the past say 80s and 90s was historically libertarian. It was socially liberal to the extent the dudes there liked free and easy sex but i dont think it was ever naturally woke.
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
It feels like the March statement is now going to be incredibly important for Labour. If it does result in Reeves having to confirm that the fiscal headroom has gone and cuts will follow, it is going to cause a lot of fallout.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
The question is who ultimately benefits.
I hear they are going to cut welfare payments. That should go down a treat with their core vote.
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
Obvious consequence there is that people who go to high-cost universities will be seriously discouraged from the sort of careers that have high social value but relatively low pay.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
Why? As they will be paying lower fees to do maths and physics than they would if they did economics for instance, whereas now the fees are the same.
Fees in theology and humanities would also be drastically lower than fees in medicine or business or IT too. Law students who wanted to do legal aid work in criminal or family law could also be offered scholarships and bursaries while law students who wanted to commercial work or work for a City firm doing corporate law would pay full fees.
So yes it certainly would be a country I wanted to live in and would actually do the opposite of what you are suggesting once you take account of the higher fees for degrees with the highest earning premium.
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.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
And one of the under-commented features of the current labour market is that the inexorable generous increases in the minimum wage, coupled with pay restraint for many people in what Miliband called the ‘squeezed middle’, means that a surprisingly large number of previous well-above-minimum pay rates are now pegged to the minimum wage. A feature that remuneration professionals would describe as the erosion of differentials.
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.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
Disagree. In the 90s you could pick up a terrace in the north of england for 40 grand.
You can pick one up in Hordern Village now for less than that and other old towns up here
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.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
Its also why AI wont give us the utopian future pro.ised though it will make life easier in lots of ways.
Are you this week’s Sunday Russian? Given that your time zone is ahead of ours, you’re relatively late on the scene today?
One of the poor schmucks who don't pay their boss a big enough bribe not to work Sunday nights (but a big enough bribe to avoid being sent to join the meet waves....)
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
History suggests that unseating prominent ministers is actually quite difficult. He’s a lot more prominent now, in cabinet, than he was in opposition. Voters like having a ‘big name’ MP. Yes, there was a spirited campaign against him by the pro-Palestinian independent in his seat, but what salience will that issue have come the next GE? Neither the Tories nor LibDems can now win his seat, so excepting another left field independent, he’s completely safe.
If Labour continue to be unpopular in the runup to the next GE is there not a chance of some lefty populist-y movement potentially taking off in some of these seats?
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Silicon Valley in the past say 80s and 90s was historically libertarian. It was socially liberal to the extent the dudes there liked free and easy sex but i dont think it was ever naturally woke.
That’s my experience too. It is, after all, technology. Not academia, not the media or creative industries. And very male. The contrast with San Francisco is marked. It’s modern low rise burbs and strip malls not conservation areas and mass transit.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
It feels like the March statement is now going to be incredibly important for Labour. If it does result in Reeves having to confirm that the fiscal headroom has gone and cuts will follow, it is going to cause a lot of fallout.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
The question is who ultimately benefits.
"being the bad guys" = doing the difficult shit of actually being in power.
Welcome to the reality of governing, Labour. If austerity is required, austerity it is.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
My view is that it will still be an issue.
Yes, it’s a brave man or a fool - perhaps both - that predicts “Gaza will not be issue” in three or four years
The only way I can see it not being an issue is if Israel has completed Operation Drive Them Out and has made Gaza uninhabitable and seized the entire West Bank
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
You should be worrying about coming third (or worse), next time around. Sensible educated middle class folk won’t vote for you after the Brexit-Johnson-Truss fruitloop shitshow, and working class Brexit types would rather vote for the real thing.
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
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
Maggie beat Callaghan by 7% in 1979 and found herself behind Labour straight away. Inheriting a complete mess from an exhausted Government doesn't make for instant popularity.
OTOH Starmer also suffers from being an uninspiring figure whose administration has already squandered a lot of political capital on measures that are simultaneously unpopular and ineffectual, largely thanks to the Treasury. The winter fuel payment decision was a particular own goal: if they were going to thump the wealthy grey vote then they really needed to do it in a way that would raise a lot of money, not with a measure that simultaneously looks heartless and will quite possibly transpire to have been revenue neutral.
You get the overall impression that Labour have some of the right ideas - and they're certainly less malignant than the Conservatives - but they're insufficiently competent and far too timid to effect the scale of change that's needed to refloat our rapidly sinking country. If Starmer survives the next election with a reduced majority, this will most likely be attributable to the manifest uselessness of the rump Tories, allied to Reform hitting its ceiling of support outside of areas that are both poor and white.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
You should be worrying about coming third (or worse), next time around. Sensible educated middle class folk won’t vote for you after the Brexit-Johnson-Truss fruitloop shitshow, and working class Brexit types would rather vote for the real thing.
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
Does that also apply to its stock / policies. A seemingly random selection of priorities that don’t really appeal to that many people
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
Obvious consequence there is that people who go to high-cost universities will be seriously discouraged from the sort of careers that have high social value but relatively low pay.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
Why? As they will be paying lower fees to do maths and physics than they would if they did economics for instance, whereas now the fees are the same.
Fees in theology and humanities would also be drastically lower than fees in medicine or business or IT too. Law students who wanted to do legal aid work in criminal or family law could also be offered scholarships and bursaries while law students who wanted to commercial work or work for a City firm doing corporate law would pay full fees.
So yes it certainly would be a country I wanted to live in and would actually do the opposite of what you are suggesting once you take account of the higher fees for degrees with the highest earning premium.
If you don't get a high earning job, you won't pay all of the fees back anyway. So essentially there already is a sliding scale of fees, linked to earning potential of the degree.
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 .
No doubt for now my cause is lost, but the thought that there would subjects where people are encouraged to do them only if they want financial advantage indicates cultural and moral collapse. This triumph of extrinsic over intrinsic value removes a huge amount of what makes living worth the effort.
If anything that is exactly what we have now. Why study history, english, classics, theology or music or art when you can study economics, business or law or IT for the same fee and earn much higher earnings after
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
History suggests that unseating prominent ministers is actually quite difficult. He’s a lot more prominent now, in cabinet, than he was in opposition. Voters like having a ‘big name’ MP. Yes, there was a spirited campaign against him by the pro-Palestinian independent in his seat, but what salience will that issue have come the next GE? Neither the Tories nor LibDems can now win his seat, so excepting another left field independent, he’s completely safe.
If Labour continue to be unpopular in the runup to the next GE is there not a chance of some lefty populist-y movement potentially taking off in some of these seats?
The Green Party, in places like Newham, for sure.
After all, most commentators and most bettors didn’t think the Greens would come through in seats like those they won in Suffolk and Herefordshire, yet they did.
But some random anti-Israel independent would be exceptionally lucky to win through against one of the (struggling) government’s relative high-performers, when we’d expect the Gaza issue to be less salient then than now.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Yes but whether Musk's heart is in the same place as Trump or JD Vance is open to doubt. Maybe this is another calculation, as you suggest.
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.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
Shouldn't universities be able to charge whatever they can get away with? If students are prepared to pay £30k a year to do bowling green management at Del Monte, who are we to stop them?
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OTOH Starmer also suffers from being an uninspiring figure whose administration has already squandered a lot of political capital on measures that are simultaneously unpopular and ineffectual, largely thanks to the Treasury. The winter fuel payment decision was a particular own goal: if they were going to thump the wealthy grey vote then they really needed to do it in a way that would raise a lot of money, not with a measure that simultaneously looks heartless and will quite possibly transpire to have been revenue neutral.
You get the overall impression that Labour have some of the right ideas - and they're certainly less malignant than the Conservatives - but they're insufficiently competent and far too timid to effect the scale of change that's needed to refloat our rapidly sinking country. If Starmer survives the next election with a reduced majority, this will most likely be attributable to the manifest uselessness of the rump Tories, allied to Reform hitting its ceiling of support outside of areas that are both poor and white.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
Brexit severely weakened them as an ideologically coherent party of national ambition, Boris and Truss dealt the death blows.
Kemi is a lightweight, and she has inherited an impossible task. She doesn’t have the brains, gravitas, or charisma to pull it off (and who does?).
I still hope the Conservative and Unionist Party might someday rise from the ashes
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
£30 billion a term is more like it.
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
It's great for those of us with multiple interests but not wanting them all in the same feed, keeping politics siloed from film for example. The replies are also interesting and useful rather than blue ticked trolls. It works far better than Xitter lists.
There does seem to be a problem with their servers keeping up with demand from the rapid expansion in numbers joining, and also an increase in usability as it reaches critical mass.
And the problem with saying what Labour should have done is... well the question is really about how to fix the mess the Tories left.
And there won't be an election for 4 or 5 years, alternative policies aren't really needed. Maybe some alternative *ideas* but to be honest we are too fixated on parties coming in and and changing stuff, they need fewer policies not more
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
The Tories call for a public enquiry into grooming looks like the sole popular intervention that Kemi has made so far (hence the fury of those on the left at her for making it), whereas this ludicrous equivocation of Stride getting his jowls in a wobble refusing to say that Reeves isn't up to the job is actually what you want him to do.
'The sugar rush of opposing Labour' is called being an opposition. If Tory supporters here had questioned why Labour was continually bashing the Government instead of attacking the Lib Dems, you'd have thought they were complete loons.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/12/lib-dem-report-says-leftwing-alliance-not-needed-because-of-tactical-voting
It would save you time if you just typed 'I hate Brexit WAAAAHHHHHHHH!' and didn't try to gussy it up as some sort of informed commentary.
I can think of maybe 20-25 seats where a soft Corbynite candidate might realistically hope to beat a Streetingist. Might be enough to throw a spanner in the works if one of the right-wing parties were to take a decisive lead over the other during a campaign.
Stride could certainly have said 'She has been very poor, but at the moment a resignation would probably further destabilise an already bad situation, so I think she should face the music and fix what she's broken.' - that would at least have been a view. He could also have scored a point saying he wasn't sure who else within Labour would do any better.
What he did do was go in totally unprepared for that question (bizarrely as he'd just penned a Telegraph article on how awful Reeves is), and come out of it like a harassed Government spokesman saying things were 'a matter for the Prime Minister'.
It was pitiable.
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
My best guess as things stand is that the major net beneficiaries at the next GE will be Reform. You can quite easily see a moribund Conservative Party shipping almost as many marginal seats to the Liberal Democrats as it manages to win back from Labour.
The following people on previous threads either gave their consent or were listed by others. Do you have them all?
@mattwardman.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5085644/#Comment_5085644
@davidherdson.bsky.social
@stuartteachphys.bsky.social
@cyclefree.bsky.social
@hwwpotts.bsky.social
@jydenham.bsky.social
@eek.bsky.social
@goat.navy
@jwsidders.bsky.social
@alastairmeeks.bsky.social
@foxinsoxuk.bsky.social
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5085716/#Comment_5085716
@sladeward.bsky.social
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5085752/#Comment_5085752
@xotgd.bsky.social (SandyRentool)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/5085798/#Comment_5085798
If the Conservatives can’t adapt to the new political order, they’ll be replaced by a party of the right which can.
We (well, you actually) gave away our rights and paid billions for the pleasure.
Think I’m kidding - I’m just applying what’s happened in Redcar since 2010
**gained rights.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
If bluesky gradually attracts more of the information/news oriented posters, then X will lose half its raison d'être.
I'm followed by Foxy but I haven't yet posted.
Half the city is entirely without power, and plunged into darkness. Dogs wander in the dystopian dark, the only light is from random fires reflected off razor wire
Then on the corner there will be a really chic tapas and wine bar, with excellent pepper sauced ribeye and a good selection of Riojas
Not least because the newest breed of nepo chefs don’t actually want to be chefs. If Brooklyn fancied work in a professional kitchen, he could get a job in the next ten minutes. Every kitchen has vacancies post-Brexit. And not just menial roles, either. One of my lads came straight out of culinary school into a Jason Atherton restaurant. I imagined him peeling potatoes for six months. “I’m on larder,” he explained, after day one. I thought he meant running errands from the larder. Transpires larder is what laymen call starters. He made them, applied the dressings, arranged the plate. Head chef checked it at the pass. If he was satisfied, Will’s food went out.
So Brooklyn could do that today, if he wished. He could do it at the place where my lad is now head chef.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/no-phoenix-wills-is-born-to-do-it-not-a-wannabe-0vdlfm76s
Barring catastrophe or some massive polling surge, Labour will go to the polls in 2029. By then
- the Israel-Gaza war will almost certainly be in the past, and Netanyahu is unlikely to be Israeli PM
- Trump will have finished his second term. Either the Democrats will be back in, or his acolyte, or he’ll have overturned the constitutional term limits
- Le Pen will probably be French president. Zelenskyy almost certainly won’t be Ukraine president
- China may have invaded Taiwan
- The world economy will be in a very different place. Either better or worse than now, but not the same
- Labour’s domestic policies on the NHS, net zero, migration, law and order and a host of other issues will either have succeeded or failed
All of which means the political arguments of today will have little bearing on the results of 2029.
https://bsky.app/profile/mikegalsworthy.bsky.social/post/3lfkah62xbs2o
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
You have to admit it is an exciting production. Full of drama and unexpected plot twists. Best time to be alive.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
The question is who ultimately benefits.
But Londoners are relatively youthful and well educated, and the Tories have resolutely turned their back on such folk. The large Jewish population in Ilford North has been on the decline, due to low birth rate and the tendency of their kids to assimilate or move away, while the growing Muslim population of Ilford South has inexorably spread into the roads north of Eastern Avenue. And the Tories’ obsession with Brexit was always aimed at its rural redoubts, rather than people living in the planet’s premier global metropolis.
The Tories misguided repositioning kissed goodbye to winning in London, way back.
Fees in theology and humanities would also be drastically lower than fees in medicine or business or IT too. Law students who wanted to do legal aid work in criminal or family law could also be offered scholarships and bursaries while law students who wanted to commercial work or work for a City firm doing corporate law would pay full fees.
So yes it certainly would be a country I wanted to live in and would actually do the opposite of what you are suggesting once you take account of the higher fees for degrees with the highest earning premium.
Welcome to the reality of governing, Labour. If austerity is required, austerity it is.
The only way I can see it not being an issue is if Israel has completed Operation Drive Them Out and has made Gaza uninhabitable and seized the entire West Bank
And that in itself might be a bit of an issue…
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_1983_United_Kingdom_general_election
After all, most commentators and most bettors didn’t think the Greens would come through in seats like those they won in Suffolk and Herefordshire, yet they did.
But some random anti-Israel independent would be exceptionally lucky to win through against one of the (struggling) government’s relative high-performers, when we’d expect the Gaza issue to be less salient then than now.