Rachel Reeves is today urged to tell Britain's regulators and quangos to 'get out of the way' as she asks for their help in reviving Britain's stuttering economic growth.
Ministers asked them to offer suggestions in the wake of last year's Budget, which triggered a sharp fall in business confidence.
However, they are said to be underwhelmed by the proposals so far, which appear to involve the bodies continuing to fulfil existing roles.
No shit
I wish her well but she needs to do more than just tell them. She also needs to focus her fire on Natural England, a bar to growth if ever there was one.
It’s hardly Natural England that is a bar to growth. It’s the laws which it is their duty to regulate. Which they didn’t put on the statute.
And in any case we’ve seen where light touch regulation takes us. Rivers full of shit.
At a time of biodiversity and climate crisis, we need to do more for nature not less, but the farming lobby stands in the way of every single atrempt to create the conditions for nature recovery.
I suggest you stop looking for simple solutions and scapegoats and look at the bigger picture. Or at least substantiate your arguments better than whatever simplistic drivel is presented in the popular media.
How do other nations deal with their bats and great crested newts ?
Do you mean that other countries don’t build £120m bat tunnels and spend millions more relocating species that are found all over the country?
That’s formally designating a park as a park, still no £120m bat tunnels.
I didn’t say it was exactly the same.
On the bat tunnel.
The thing that struck me, in all the reporting was the claim that "Not a single bat could be allowed to die"
This requirement is insane - we don't design projects to prevent all human deaths. Otherwise there would be zero infrastructure projects.
So either the requirement was misreported everywhere, or we have another classic.
People who don't actually know or understand regulations trying to implement them and coming up with absurd results.
Bugger the bats. There are millions of the fuckers.
These are Bechstein's Bats, of which there are only ~20k in the UK.
A good example of something happening often. Bechstein bats are rare in Britain, but in general among the 'least threatened' species.
IANAE but I think this is common because of planetary geography. We are, by our position + being an island, right of the edge of the complete range of lots of species, there being nowhere further to go than the British isles.
Which means we are of marginal importance for Bechsteins and corncrakes and loads of other things.
But by the same reasoning of our position we are critically important for loads of seabirds. We should concentrate on them.
But all the others, bats and all, are nice to have, though not at stupid cost.
It's the same with the Jumping Spiders (an invasive species too no less) who caused, or helped cause, the cessation of a project to build a theme park in Kent.
This spider is critically endangered in the UK but is Least concern globally.
I can report that China totally dominates the new car market here in junta-ruled south central Myanmar. Probably not a massive market, in the wider scheme, but interesting
20, 40 , 60 years ago it must have been very different, they might even have driven new British cars, at one point
No 2nd hand jags ?!
Older cars are all Japanese, new cars are all Chinese
Bit disappointed not to see vintage Austin Allegros, etc
I saw a picture of the Vandenplas on Twitter the other day. Gorgeous it was. Sadly they only made those bad boys for about a year. So not many about now. We should be protecting them not newts.
Austin Allegro, a cracking car, a square steering wheel on the early models.
A 1979 snapdragon yellow Allegro was my first car. Did nearly 100,000 miles in it. Loved it. Got written off by a boy racer while parked outside the house in 1990. I shall never forget the look the nice garage man gave me when I asked if it was economically repairable. I think the insurer gave me £500 for it, which must have been several times what it was worth - which was approximately zero.
Well done Labour for taking prompt action on this once he fessed up.
They have handled this well.
Though if he avoids a custodial sentence he could remain an Independent MP until the next general election
Which from what people have posted in the thread looks like it could happen and he could get a non custodial.
I think violent thugs deserve time, but we see all the time people who are violent getting last warnings and not getting jail time. Especially repeat offenders of which Mr Amesbury isn't.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
Surely. Isn't that a criminal offence, so they have to? I forget the deets of electoral law
The bad news for Labour is relentless. It feels like a weary government facing defeat after 13 years in power. Yet they won a landslide six months ago. V odd
No, you can be an MP as long as not serving a prison term of a year or more at the time.
A recall petition is likely though if he gets a custodial sentence as that is triggered if any custodial sentence is given of any length even if suspended. If he just gets community service or a fine though he may be able to avoid that too
Clearly Culpability A based on the reports, I haven't seen enough to determine if it's likely to be Harm 1, 2 or 3 - but even Harm 1 doesn't require a custodial sentence and I'd be surprised if he got one.
The question of whether he and Starmer think he can ride out the storm if not actually liable to recall is an interesting one.
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
I wonder if they see Trump as a good opportunity, or as a dangerous variable
I saw an article the other day which argued that a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would give china such an advantage in chips, tech, AI, robotics, that it could overtake America and rule the world
I am not at all sure it is true, but even if it is only potentially true, America could not risk that. So America would either have to fight China mano a mano, or demand that Taiwan destroy its own tech industry before the Chinese seize it
Interesting times, etc
Scuttlebutt is that Taiwan will destroy the valuables at TSMC and elsewhere if China tries to invade. That'll hurt us (but so would TSMC under Chinese control...)
As for Trump: my view was that he would have been seen as a dangerous variable. But his talk about annexing Panama, Greenland and even Canada will be music to Xi's ears. How can America complain if China takes (what it sees as) its own territory back, if the USA claims areas that are not its own?
Putin will also be liking the talk, for the same reasons.
The NEO Imperalist age. Turkey would like the Kurdish areas of Syria.
Well, yes. I fear that is where we're heading. IMV like in the 1910s and 1930s, these clashing territorial claims will lead to a wider war. Except this time with the major belligerents having nuclear weapons.
Putin, Xi, Trump... they and their ilk are all small men with vainglorious grand plans. It will only take one of them to trigger a catastrophe. But appeasing them will only make the potential catastrophe larger.
Surely. Isn't that a criminal offence, so they have to? I forget the deets of electoral law
The bad news for Labour is relentless. It feels like a weary government facing defeat after 13 years in power. Yet they won a landslide six months ago. V odd
No, you can be an MP as long as not serving a prison term of a year or more at the time.
A recall petition is likely though if he gets a custodial sentence as that is triggered if any custodial sentence is given of any length even if suspended. If he just gets community service or a fine though he may be able to avoid that too
Clearly Culpability A based on the reports, I haven't seen enough to determine if it's likely to be Harm 1, 2 or 3 - but even Harm 1 doesn't require a custodial sentence and I'd be surprised if he got one.
The question of whether he and Starmer think he can ride out the storm if not actually liable to recall is an interesting one.
Labour have expelled him according to someone upthread.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
Well done Labour for taking prompt action on this once he fessed up.
They have handled this well.
But I doubt if they, or the Tories, will fancy a by-election which would undoubtedly be Lab v Reform. OTOH most PBers would enjoy it very much, as would the media and all politics watchers.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
Austen. “I dare say you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that you would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be quite as dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were mounting your horse, a friend were to say, ‘Bingley, you had better stay till next week,’ you would probably do it, you would probably not go — and at another word, might stay a month.”
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
What were europhiles and Remainers thinking when they kept denying the British people a referendum on EU integration at every single stage of it, despite so many promises? Maastricht, the Constitution, Lisbon, on and on, "cast iron guarantees", it was endless, and every time they reneged on those promises our democracy died a little bit more
I am afraid it was you lot that guaranteed Brexit, in the end, with these decades of cowardice and mendacity. Own it. Brexit is yours
Not to mention every single court casedating back at least to Wheeler finding some tenuous justification to find for the pro-EU side.
BREAKING: The High Court has ruled the government's consultation into plans to slash billions of pounds from disability benefits claimants was unlawful
Rachel Reeves is today urged to tell Britain's regulators and quangos to 'get out of the way' as she asks for their help in reviving Britain's stuttering economic growth.
Ministers asked them to offer suggestions in the wake of last year's Budget, which triggered a sharp fall in business confidence.
However, they are said to be underwhelmed by the proposals so far, which appear to involve the bodies continuing to fulfil existing roles.
No shit
I wish her well but she needs to do more than just tell them. She also needs to focus her fire on Natural England, a bar to growth if ever there was one.
Rachel from accounts belatedly realising that the UK needs a Department of Government Efficiency.
Oh, and that doesn’t mean employing 500 McKinsey staff to produce a 3,000 page report in 2027, it means doing it the American way and getting a couple of maverick business types in to cut out whole swathes of the standing bureaucracy and repealing the legislation that supports them.
Governments of all stripes have been the same since Thatcher, always talking about making efficiencies but overseeing a constant rise in the cost of government.
The problem is that DOGE is bullshit.
Given that it was the Budget which triggered the fall in business confidence perhaps she could look at that.
Meanwhile Torsten Bell is saying interesting things about pensions.
What's he saying.
No more triple lock, reduce the tax free lump sum to £40K and raise the age at which you can take a pension to 57.
Reduce the tax free sum to £40k !?!! Cripes I'm above that now for 25%, in my early 40s and not even a higher rate tax payer. The age raise to 57 is fine though I think.
It seems a sensible proposal, but like applying CGT to private home sales it would go down like a lead balloon though raising the age to 57 plus is good
Reducing the tax free lump sum would impact me but it is a while off, but I plan to take my pension pot ad UFPLS so get the tax free lump sum with every withdrawal.
Is the age to take a pension just limited to accessing a DC pot or will it apply to public sector and the remaining private sector DB schemes too ? That is coming in for DC anyway.
Get rid of the triple lock for sure. They should take the hit now and live with the consequences. Changing the inflation measure applied in the future is going to help.
I think any party committed to the triple lock continuing at the next GE is not serious about tackling the nations financial situation.
That doesn't mean no rise of course, but puts it back to the discretion of the Chancellor.
Similarly statements about no rises in this or that tax. We need honest approaches with governments able to adjust the tiller on the ship of state according to changes in wind direction and sea state.
Which is why I suggested that as Labour Chancellor I would have gone for -
1) Merge Income Tax and employee NI. This brings a number of people into paying NI (in effect). 2) As part of this reform, simplify the bands and increase the rates a bit 3) Sell it as "Needed to save the NHS" and "We will bring rates down, later, when we can" - AKA Election Give Away. 4) Put all the pensioner benefits apart from the actual pension in the blender. Roll out new, means tested benefits. So WFP would go away. 5) Sell this as "More for the poor"
The markets would have liked this - tax to spend is OK, borrow to spend is what upsets things. The Labour supporters would have been happier with this, I reckon.
So Labour would have gone into an election telling pensioners... We are completely changing your pension but cant tell you exactly how except it will be means tested, going to make you pay more tax (since they don't pay NI now and rates are going up).
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
I just received Krugman's latest missive, in which he says this:
"For a nation’s balance of payments always balances. That is (with some slight technical adjustments),
Trade balance + Net inflows of capital = 0
I often run into people who believe that a successful economy, one achieving rapid productivity growth and leading in cutting-edge technology, will both run big trade surpluses because it’s so competitive and attract lots of foreign capital because it’s such a good investment. But that’s arithmetically impossible."
Why is this arithmetically impossible? Could a country not simply accumulate a great pile of wealth like an acquisitive dragon?
Also, I kinda feel like Krugman underplays the extent to which running a trade surplus (and then presumably investing in foreign assets to keep an overall balance) in the long term leads to a more prosperous country, while the opposite, leads to a more impoverished country.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Surely. Isn't that a criminal offence, so they have to? I forget the deets of electoral law
The bad news for Labour is relentless. It feels like a weary government facing defeat after 13 years in power. Yet they won a landslide six months ago. V odd
They were not ready for government. And yet the Tories were not fit for government.
I find it hard to see Starmer being PM after the next election.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
@Cyclefree has pointed out that it gives rise to a perceived conflict of interest.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He also had Shamima Begum as a client. And several Islamist terrorists
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He did. Note both @leon and @moonshine (yesterday) made the same point. Amazing how these people make points in complete ignorance.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He also had Shamima Begum as a client. And several Islamist terrorists
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
He also said Britain was obliged to hand over the Chagos Islands, when no such obligation actually exists.
I just received Krugman's latest missive, in which he says this:
"For a nation’s balance of payments always balances. That is (with some slight technical adjustments),
Trade balance + Net inflows of capital = 0
I often run into people who believe that a successful economy, one achieving rapid productivity growth and leading in cutting-edge technology, will both run big trade surpluses because it’s so competitive and attract lots of foreign capital because it’s such a good investment. But that’s arithmetically impossible."
Why is this arithmetically impossible? Could a country not simply accumulate a great pile of wealth like an acquisitive dragon?
Also, I kinda feel like Krugman underplays the extent to which running a trade surplus (and then presumably investing in foreign assets to keep an overall balance) in the long term leads to a more prosperous country, while the opposite, leads to a more impoverished country.
Moderate trade surpluses are better than huge ones, which point to structural problems with the economy (as with modern Germany).
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He also had Shamima Begum as a client. And several Islamist terrorists
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
Low IQ Leon strikes again, and your comment may well cause you problems with the OSA, so I will be passing your details to the authorities if they come calling.
Surely. Isn't that a criminal offence, so they have to? I forget the deets of electoral law
The bad news for Labour is relentless. It feels like a weary government facing defeat after 13 years in power. Yet they won a landslide six months ago. V odd
The recall process gets triggered if he receives a custodial sentence (including suspended ones).
Illuminating, ta
It will be an interesting test, in that case, if he gets away with a large fine or community service, to see if he can continue as an MP. Would Labour even want that? It's terrible optics. An MP with a criminal conviction for assault?
It's not a speeding fine, or even drunk driving. It's way worse than that
He can and certainly will if he avoids a custodial sentence. If Farage complains Sir Keir can also point to the Reform MP for Basildon who even served prison time for assaulting a former partner (though Kemi and Sir Ed might I suspect Farage will keep quiet for that reason)
Explanation of possible outcome
While assault by beating is a summary only offence, meaning it can only be tried in the magistrates’ court, it can result in a custodial sentence of up to six months. When deciding the sentence, however, the fact that you are a first-time offender will be taken into account.
Therefore, if it is a first-time offence without any aggravating features, it is possible that you could receive an alternative outcome other than a custodial sentence, although this will still depend on the circumstances of your case.
When considering an appropriate sentence for assault by beating, the magistrates or district judge will take into account a number of factors, both mitigating and aggravating.
Aggravating factors include an abuse of power, commission of the offence while under the influence of alcohol and drugs or attempts to prevent the complainant from reporting the incident.
Mitigating factors may include an offender’s remorse, their cooperation with the police and the fact that they are a first-time offender.
These mitigating circumstances, including being a first-time offender, may help to bring the sentence down from a custodial sentence to an alternative outcome, ranging from a discharge to a suspended sentence:
This is all true, but it's worthy of note that the starting point - even for Culpability A and Harm 1 - is a community order.
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
You would have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have prompted the West to prepare seriously for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but there's not much sign of the required urgency.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He also had Shamima Begum as a client. And several Islamist terrorists
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
Low IQ strikes again, and your comment may well cause you problems with the OSA, so I will be passing your details to the authorities if they come calling.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
I mainly quoted you (twice) which is perhaps why it was a doubly dull post.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Walk on By"?
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
You would have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have prompted the West to prepare seriously for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but there's not much sign of the required urgency.
You might also have thought the invasion of Ukraine might have led China to conclude that mounting an invasion in far more challenging circumstances might end very badly for them.
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
I mainly quoted you (twice) which is perhaps why it was a doubly dull post.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, " Walk on By"?
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Assuming the AG had Gerry Adams as a client - which is completely proper, barristers don't go round picking and choosing on moral or political grounds - it is not for him to make any any public comment at all in relation to his dealings with his client, any more than a doctor or surgeon would.
He also had Shamima Begum as a client. And several Islamist terrorists
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
Low IQ strikes again, and your comment may well cause you problems with the OSA, so I will be passing your details to the authorities if they come calling.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
I just feel the need when Remainers trot out the suggestion that the desire for Brexit was a flash in the pan to confirm that in my case, it isn't.
I've been Brexity since long before it was unfashionable.
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
I just feel the need when Remainers trot out the suggestion that the desire for Brexit was a flash in the pan to confirm that in my case, it isn't.
I've been Brexity since long before it was unfashionable.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
Surely. Isn't that a criminal offence, so they have to? I forget the deets of electoral law
The bad news for Labour is relentless. It feels like a weary government facing defeat after 13 years in power. Yet they won a landslide six months ago. V odd
No, you can be an MP as long as not serving a prison term of a year or more at the time.
A recall petition is likely though if he gets a custodial sentence as that is triggered if any custodial sentence is given of any length even if suspended. If he just gets community service or a fine though he may be able to avoid that too
Clearly Culpability A based on the reports, I haven't seen enough to determine if it's likely to be Harm 1, 2 or 3 - but even Harm 1 doesn't require a custodial sentence and I'd be surprised if he got one.
The question of whether he and Starmer think he can ride out the storm if not actually liable to recall is an interesting one.
Labour have expelled him according to someone upthread.
Yeah, and I think that makes a by election less likely, as Starmer no longer has leverage and Amesbury has no reason but conscience to step down, he wouldn't be fighting a subsequent by election.
Maybe he has a conscience. We'll find out, I guess.
Philippe Sands says he’s proud that in Britain it’s not held against you if you humiliate your own country completely while representing a foreign government.
By some people yes, others no, that’s kind of the way it works. I have some regard for him (mainly based on his book East West Street and the related film) which took a bit of a knock when he associated himself with comedy Unionist outfit These Islands. Seems to have consciously decoupled from them so all tickety boo again.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I don't recall that one but I've heard about it. You can't go writing whole places off. I liked him in the Times though. I agree with him on a couple of big things and his prose style appeals to me. I find it very elegant.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
I mainly quoted you (twice) which is perhaps why it was a doubly dull post.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Walk on By"?
Actually you will find the words were Hal David's
Burt Bacharach was the composer and Hal David the Lyricist. Similar to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's relationship.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I don't recall that one but I've heard about it. You can't go writing whole places off. I liked him in the Times though. I agree with him on a couple of big things and his prose style appeals to me. I find it very elegant.
His autobiography is entertaining (I think it was written in the late 90s). His life before being an MP in particular was interesting.
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
You would have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have prompted the West to prepare seriously for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but there's not much sign of the required urgency.
You might also have thought the invasion of Ukraine might have led China to conclude that mounting an invasion in far more challenging circumstances might end very badly for them.
CHIPS Act in the US?
EDIT: It's an interesting piece of game theory.
1) Current State a) Taiwan is the only source of high end microchips (some of) b) If the Chinese invade, they plan to destroy the capability c) Either this succeeds causing a hi-tech recession in every country, or China gets control and gets to dictate to other countries as it pleases
2) CHIPS act a) - b) - c) If the destruction succeeds, the US is the sole supplier of theses chips. They can invoke devastating sanctions on China or anyone who allow smuggling on the chips to China. If the destruction doesn't succeed, then China can't use the chip supply to control international reaction.
The excellent H.I.Sutton has a video out on China's build-up for an invasion of Taiwan. They are building a fleet of barges whose only purpose is amphibious landing.
The sound quality is poor, but it's a case where the content matters far more than the presentation. I am changing my view to a *likelihood* that China tries to take Taiwan by force within the next four years.
You would have thought that the invasion of Ukraine would have prompted the West to prepare seriously for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but there's not much sign of the required urgency.
You might also have thought the invasion of Ukraine might have led China to conclude that mounting an invasion in far more challenging circumstances might end very badly for them.
Theory: lots of foreign policy thinkers and writers didn't see Ukraine coming and are now compensating by overestimating the odds of China invading Taiwan.
Pictured, from earlier today: Taiwan's earliest locomotive, built in England in 1871, first used in Japan then transferred to their then colony.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
I mainly quoted you (twice) which is perhaps why it was a doubly dull post.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Walk on By"?
Actually you will find the words were Hal David's
Burt Bacharach was the composer and Hal David the Lyricist. Similar to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's relationship.
Indeed, that is quite impressive put- down pedantry.
I thought I'd dodged a bullet because I originally wrote "in the words of Dionne Warwick".
Amazingly there is a last minute hitch on the Israeli side as Bibi looks for a way to stay in power/avoid his trial claims Hamas are seeking to "extort last minute concessions" so no vote to take place for the time being.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Have you considered the idea of posting, for the first time, a comment of your own that is, in any way, interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry. diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable, or even worth reading for more than a fraction of a second?
It might benefit the site, if you made that debut. Go on, I am sure you can do it. Just one comment worth reading. Just one. Try and squeeze it out. Take a week off, to really work up to it
Seeing as you asked me politely and directly I will give you the courtesy of a response rather than rudely scrolling by.
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
Bless. You really tried hard with that comment, didn't you?
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
I mainly quoted you (twice) which is perhaps why it was a doubly dull post.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Walk on By"?
Actually you will find the words were Hal David's
Burt Bacharach was the composer and Hal David the Lyricist. Similar to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's relationship.
Indeed, that is quite impressive put- down pedantry.
I thought I'd dodged a bullet because I originally wrote "in the words of Dionne Warwick".
If you like their work try catching, if you haven't, Burt Bacharach at the BBC. BBC4 showed it a while back.
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 1h 🚨UPDATE The implosion of the UK chemicals sector continued in Nov, according to this morning's data. Cumulative fall in output since 2021 is now 38% 👇 It's further evidence of continued UK deindustrialisation, in the face of high energy prices
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 27m Nor is this just a UK-specific trend. Look at Germany, where both the chemicals sector and the wider energy intensive manufacturing sector have seen large falls in output in the past few years 👇 Europe is deindustrialising, and fast.
Rachel Reeves is today urged to tell Britain's regulators and quangos to 'get out of the way' as she asks for their help in reviving Britain's stuttering economic growth.
Ministers asked them to offer suggestions in the wake of last year's Budget, which triggered a sharp fall in business confidence.
However, they are said to be underwhelmed by the proposals so far, which appear to involve the bodies continuing to fulfil existing roles.
No shit
I wish her well but she needs to do more than just tell them. She also needs to focus her fire on Natural England, a bar to growth if ever there was one.
Rachel from accounts belatedly realising that the UK needs a Department of Government Efficiency.
Oh, and that doesn’t mean employing 500 McKinsey staff to produce a 3,000 page report in 2027, it means doing it the American way and getting a couple of maverick business types in to cut out whole swathes of the standing bureaucracy and repealing the legislation that supports them.
Governments of all stripes have been the same since Thatcher, always talking about making efficiencies but overseeing a constant rise in the cost of government.
The problem is that DOGE is bullshit.
Given that it was the Budget which triggered the fall in business confidence perhaps she could look at that.
Meanwhile Torsten Bell is saying interesting things about pensions.
What's he saying.
No more triple lock, reduce the tax free lump sum to £40K and raise the age at which you can take a pension to 57.
Reduce the tax free sum to £40k !?!! Cripes I'm above that now for 25%, in my early 40s and not even a higher rate tax payer. The age raise to 57 is fine though I think.
There does seem to be a resentment among some on the left that ordinary private sector workers can build up a financial asset worth hundreds of thousands.
Perhaps Torsten Bell could comment onsion uk/uksi/2013/2588/contents/made
Tax relief on pensions should serve a public good otherwise tax them like other income.
Imo, it is fairly clear that there is a significant public good in allowing people to generate a tax pot of about £500k - that plus the state pension would put someone on an average income.
I really don't understand at all what the the public good is for waiving tax on pension pots £1m+, perhaps pb can explain it?
Not jealousy as personally I like and use my ISA and pension tax breaks.
It gets taxed on the way out and so in the end they government gets more from it due to growth over the term. There are so many economic donkeys around it is hard to believe they actually get to positions where they can cause so much damage due to ignorance and stupidity. It only encourages saving and so limits government handouts to people impoverished when they stop working. It costs nothing and in fact earns the government money from all the future taxes.
Amazingly there is a last minute hitch on the Israeli side as Bibi looks for a way to stay in power/avoid his trial claims Hamas are seeking to "extort last minute concessions" so no vote to take place for the time being.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Rachel Reeves is today urged to tell Britain's regulators and quangos to 'get out of the way' as she asks for their help in reviving Britain's stuttering economic growth.
Ministers asked them to offer suggestions in the wake of last year's Budget, which triggered a sharp fall in business confidence.
However, they are said to be underwhelmed by the proposals so far, which appear to involve the bodies continuing to fulfil existing roles.
No shit
I wish her well but she needs to do more than just tell them. She also needs to focus her fire on Natural England, a bar to growth if ever there was one.
Rachel from accounts belatedly realising that the UK needs a Department of Government Efficiency.
Oh, and that doesn’t mean employing 500 McKinsey staff to produce a 3,000 page report in 2027, it means doing it the American way and getting a couple of maverick business types in to cut out whole swathes of the standing bureaucracy and repealing the legislation that supports them.
Governments of all stripes have been the same since Thatcher, always talking about making efficiencies but overseeing a constant rise in the cost of government.
The problem is that DOGE is bullshit.
Given that it was the Budget which triggered the fall in business confidence perhaps she could look at that.
Meanwhile Torsten Bell is saying interesting things about pensions.
What's he saying.
No more triple lock, reduce the tax free lump sum to £40K and raise the age at which you can take a pension to 57.
Reduce the tax free sum to £40k !?!! Cripes I'm above that now for 25%, in my early 40s and not even a higher rate tax payer. The age raise to 57 is fine though I think.
There does seem to be a resentment among some on the left that ordinary private sector workers can build up a financial asset worth hundreds of thousands.
Perhaps Torsten Bell could comment on whether this law should be repealed:
The Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 1h 🚨UPDATE The implosion of the UK chemicals sector continued in Nov, according to this morning's data. Cumulative fall in output since 2021 is now 38% 👇 It's further evidence of continued UK deindustrialisation, in the face of high energy prices
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky · 27m Nor is this just a UK-specific trend. Look at Germany, where both the chemicals sector and the wider energy intensive manufacturing sector have seen large falls in output in the past few years 👇 Europe is deindustrialising, and fast.
He did a really interesting to camera piece on why energy prices were high and, in a nutshell, the Russian gas we lost has never been replaced so we are using less gas. So all this talk of LNG from Qatar, Malaysia or wherever, has not materialised.
RCS has mentioned before how easy it is to repurpose a tanker on its way to a higher bidder in Asia too.
Our energy policy and the legacy of previous govts, especially Merkel in Germany, has been shambolic.
Thankfully we have Ed Miliband in charge of our energy policy so we can be confident it will all be well shortly.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He isn't the world's most authoritative commentator. I never met anyone who didn't think this goverment would be deluded and incompetent but then I don't mix with people who vote Labour I guess. However, we didn't realise they would be evil. Did talk with a Socialist yesterday, incomprehending as to why all the farmers objected to the budget. He genuinely hadn't realised there was no-one in the room of about 100 who would not be damaged by the proposals. Then he wondered why he wasn't getting any work out of family businesses.
Good "don't mention the war" moment on Farming Today when the Beeboid told the Farmer's Guardian editor to talk about LAMMA and what was the confidence like for new machinery purchases but not to mention the Budget. More of less turned round and said well what is the point of interviewing me, this government is a disaster for the industry, end of. To be fair there were quite a few interviews, I don't think there was one that didn't comment as to what a catastrophe the election of this government was.
Yes, they aren't just inept, bungling, stupid, craven, and all the rest
They are actively evil. This government is actively evil, and treacherous. Evidence A, M'Lud
"The Attorney General will not say whether he stands to gain financially if the government pay out to Gerry Adams.
Nor has he said whether he was involved in decisions which benefit his former client.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
If this is a willy waving contest, I can match that. I met Salim Bin Laden in the 1980s ( the one who killed himself in a Florida plane crash and whose English widow married his brother Abdullah. Salim was a half brother of Osama.
Growth of 0.1% could easily be a contraction of 0.1% or worse after revisions.
Or growth of 0.2%. GDP estimates go all over the place when they’re revised but in recent years they’ve tended to go up.
I think that that you are missing the important PB herd consensus:
Under Tory chancellors revisions are always upwards under Labour ones always downwards.
Similarly rich people need bumper payrises to motivate them, poor people getting payrises are a drag on productivity.
I've taken to scrolling past the "Reeves is shit" posters, the Tory/Reform/ Trump/Musk rampers and when they are on, the race baiters. There not much left to read. I note with sadness the non-RefCon post count has diminished considerably.
Pity she really is shit though.
Quite. The "Reeves is shit" comments might be less annoying for PB lefties if Reeves wasn't so painfully and obviously, well, shit
Mathhew Parris demolishes her here, showing that the old coot still has a bit of kick in him
"Where was the evidence of capability, or of any plan? There was never good reason to believe that Labour knew what to do. The Chancellor has not changed: she is now, as she was in opposition, an empty vessel. The Prime Minister has not changed: he is still today, as he was when opposition leader, bereft of ideas. Commentators were too credulous. The emperor never did have any clothes."
He's just paying the rent. In his final Times column he said people should stop expecting big plans from politicians.
Has he retired from the Times? Didn't know that
I rather liked him, it's a shame he went quite mad after Brexit (like others)
Seems to be partly recovered
He has yes. Replaced by, I'm sorry to report, Fraser Nelson. His debut column last week being a mealy-mouthed offering on Elon Musk's shenanigans.
Parris had some good contributions: he did one article on going into courts as an observer and noting the human cost of crime in the criminals and victims. He also did one in the Gordon Brown age when he pointed out that intolerable things can continue for a long time. But he then did one about a East coast seaside town about how they were depressing and poor and should be abandoned by the Conservatives as a dead loss, and I went right off him. I'm sure he makes some good points occasionally, but that will always colour my opinion of him, and there aren't that many Speccie columnists I like anyway, although that junkie travel writer is occasionally interesting.
I've been off Parris since 2007, when he wrote a poisonous Christmas column about stringing piano wire at neck height across cycle paths (Rod Liddle did something similar more recently). Then pretended it was a joke (as they always do) to avoid looking himself in the mirror.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
I just feel the need when Remainers trot out the suggestion that the desire for Brexit was a flash in the pan to confirm that in my case, it isn't.
I've been Brexity since long before it was unfashionable.
So you voted for Labour in 1983?
I'm not THAT old! In my early teens* I was a bit of a starry-eyed Eurofederalist. My Europeanness was vague but informed by the imagery of Europe in the 1950s and 60s - I had a card game from the late 50s called 'Round Europe'. Imagery below (I've posted this before, but it encapsulates better than any other image how I'd like to feel about Europe). And films like 'Monte Carlo or bust'. THAT was my homeland.
But from my late teens onward head gradually overruled heart. The idea of Eurofederalism was attractive, but in my view not really compatible with good government. I went through the process many people who come to Euroscepticism do "Europe is wonderful!" to "Europe is wonderful but its government doesn't work in its populations' interests - perhaps it can be reformed and made to work" to "We've tried and failed. European government can never be made to work."
I did, as it happens, briefly have one foot in the Labour camp after 1992, when I thought Brian Gould might have a chance. Not that it would have helped them, as I was still too young to vote and that moment had passed by the time I got to 18.
Just my view, and I appreciate many on here do not agree.
*i.e. before I had actually been to mainland Europe - though I'm sure this is a coincidence.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
I’m one step away from Hitler (via Jonathan Guinness), and two away from Stalin (via a friend who canvassed Svetlana, when she lived in Cambridge).
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
I’m one step away from Hitler (via Jonathan Guinness), and two away from Stalin (via a friend who canvassed Svetlana, when she lived in Cambridge).
I have nothing that good but I briefly worked with the granddaughter of Alexander Kerensky. She looked surprised when anyone asked about her surname and thoroughly uninterested in the connection.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
I did a quick google and it's not Hartley-Brewer if her Wiki is correct.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
Rachel Reeves is today urged to tell Britain's regulators and quangos to 'get out of the way' as she asks for their help in reviving Britain's stuttering economic growth.
Ministers asked them to offer suggestions in the wake of last year's Budget, which triggered a sharp fall in business confidence.
However, they are said to be underwhelmed by the proposals so far, which appear to involve the bodies continuing to fulfil existing roles.
No shit
I wish her well but she needs to do more than just tell them. She also needs to focus her fire on Natural England, a bar to growth if ever there was one.
Rachel from accounts belatedly realising that the UK needs a Department of Government Efficiency.
Oh, and that doesn’t mean employing 500 McKinsey staff to produce a 3,000 page report in 2027, it means doing it the American way and getting a couple of maverick business types in to cut out whole swathes of the standing bureaucracy and repealing the legislation that supports them.
Governments of all stripes have been the same since Thatcher, always talking about making efficiencies but overseeing a constant rise in the cost of government.
The problem is that DOGE is bullshit.
Given that it was the Budget which triggered the fall in business confidence perhaps she could look at that.
Meanwhile Torsten Bell is saying interesting things about pensions.
What's he saying.
No more triple lock, reduce the tax free lump sum to £40K and raise the age at which you can take a pension to 57.
Reduce the tax free sum to £40k !?!! Cripes I'm above that now for 25%, in my early 40s and not even a higher rate tax payer. The age raise to 57 is fine though I think.
There does seem to be a resentment among some on the left that ordinary private sector workers can build up a financial asset worth hundreds of thousands.
Perhaps Torsten Bell could comment on whether this law should be repealed:
The Pensions Increase (Pension Scheme for Keir Starmer QC) Regulations 2013
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
I once delivered a pizza to early 90s Madchester also-rans Northern Uproar. Does that count?
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
*snip*
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
*snip*
That must have been quite a night. Makes Nick Palmer look tame by comparison.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
I’m one step away from Hitler (via Jonathan Guinness), and two away from Stalin (via a friend who canvassed Svetlana, when she lived in Cambridge).
I have nothing that good but I briefly worked with the granddaughter of Alexander Kerensky. She looked surprised when anyone asked about her surname and thoroughly uninterested in the connection.
When studying the Russian revolution in the late 60s I asked my tutor what happened to Kerensky and was surprised to discover he was still lecturing at Stanford.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
*snip*
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
*snip*
That must have been quite a night. Makes Nick Palmer look tame by comparison.
The room involving Bill Clinton has a photograph of him in the living area.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
I just feel the need when Remainers trot out the suggestion that the desire for Brexit was a flash in the pan to confirm that in my case, it isn't.
I've been Brexity since long before it was unfashionable.
Ah no, I don't consider it a flash in the pan. It was a deep seat (of Britain First) sentiment that was mined.
Bringing Ferry/Dylan to mind for some reason.
Twas a deep (deep) A deep (deep) A deep deep oh so deep It was deep seat ... that was mined
I just received Krugman's latest missive, in which he says this:
"For a nation’s balance of payments always balances. That is (with some slight technical adjustments),
Trade balance + Net inflows of capital = 0
I often run into people who believe that a successful economy, one achieving rapid productivity growth and leading in cutting-edge technology, will both run big trade surpluses because it’s so competitive and attract lots of foreign capital because it’s such a good investment. But that’s arithmetically impossible."
Why is this arithmetically impossible? Could a country not simply accumulate a great pile of wealth like an acquisitive dragon?
Also, I kinda feel like Krugman underplays the extent to which running a trade surplus (and then presumably investing in foreign assets to keep an overall balance) in the long term leads to a more prosperous country, while the opposite, leads to a more impoverished country.
I feel an irregular verb coming on -
We have attracted inward investment You have sold off the family silver
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
I once delivered a pizza to early 90s Madchester also-rans Northern Uproar. Does that count?
That’s very good
Do you remember when this was a brilliant Viz meme? Ah, Viz. When it was funny… it was really very very funny
Anyway the meme was Lame-to-Claim Celebrity Anecdotes. I dare say yours is right up there, delivering pizza to the band members of Northern Uproar
I had a friend who used to go an NA meeting which was also attended by “the posh colonel” - that really obscure character from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum who had about two lines once every six episodes. And occasionally they would get the bass guitarist from the house band that appeared in the kids’ show Rainbow, in the distance behind Bungle and Zippy
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again.
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
That’s nothing.
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
I can beat all of that. I had a brief conversation with George Best at Xenon nightclub in Piccadilly circa 1985. I win!
Amazingly there is a last minute hitch on the Israeli side as Bibi looks for a way to stay in power/avoid his trial claims Hamas are seeking to "extort last minute concessions" so no vote to take place for the time being.
I have nothing anywhere near as good as any of these, and neither am I likely to as I do not move in such exalted circles.
But I did once go to a pre-season soccer friendly in the non league. and told a young left back he was talented and should play professionally if he got the chance.
He thanked me, said he hoped he would and was most humble.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
I can up that, I’ve actually shaken hands with all of East 17.
I was working at their concert as a volunteer charity collector back in the university RAG days, and we got given passes to the afterparty. It all got quite messy with a free bar until well after midnight.
Not only that but rejoining terms would be fairly dtaconian and then the constant interference in day to day life which we have all forgotten would be back and start to grate again
It's why I maintain that the polls on rejoining will shift massively when the costs are placed in front of the electorate.
My favourite example of this was that detailed polling by the Blair think tank which showed that people generally wanted a closer relationship with the EU, but also showed that even Remainers wanted restrictions on free movement*, which of course the EU has already ruled out as the four freedoms are considered to be inviolable.
I suspect that this is at the heart of why Labour do not want to get into such debate, as they already know that what people might stomach isn't deliverable.
* This would even make a halfway house like EFTA a real challenge to achieve.
The reality is that free movement, by making it easy to come and go and come back again and go again, provided labour markets with needed people while leading to lower long-term migration to the UK than the Conservatives' post-Brexit approach, where anyone who got a visa to come into the country then very much wants to make that permanent.
Yep. I'm afraid as time passes Brexit looks more and more like not so much a mistake as an act of vandalism against our own property. I've moved on, you have to, but it still irks. WTF were we thinking? What on earth was going on in that little head of ours?
Free movement depressed wages. Granted, it's a better solution than bringing in half the Middle East. But the fact that the Tory response to Brexit was terrible and protected capital over labour AS WELL AS filling the country up with more people than we can handle doesn't mean that the previous solution was a good one.
I'll finish with a periodic confirmation that my wavering should-we-shouldn't-we-probably-we-should has become much more ironclad certain over time. Brexit was, for me, the right decision, and I would vote for it again.
Like my granddad you are. The more you argued with him the more he would dig in. You can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much.
"I dare say" ... this was his catchphrase when under the rhetorical cosh.
People should say that more often
"I dare say"
I like it. I'd quite forgotten the phrase
I'm going to use it tonight when I have my regular gin and tonic in the bar of the Parkroyal, Rangoon. I do it every night at around 6.45pm. I'm like the colonel in Fawlty Towers. I've been here so long they know who I am and they know my weird but regular habits, they know I'm this old geezer from Britain who is a bit eccentric and works on flint sex toys in his room all day, but leaves decent tips. I'm sometimes the only person in that bar (on some days I might be the only tourist in Burma, I think)
But tonight I'm gonna switch it up. Instead of saying "mingalabar, gin and tonic, Jezuba" I'm going to say "I dare say I could polish off a nice and tonic, ta very much"
I think it will cause widespread amusement in the hotel, and perhaps even in the nation at large, and lift their spirits during a difficult time of Civil War
'I dare say' common in men of my father's generation, including my father, (born 1910).
On a vaguely related note, my wife has just organised some flowers for the birthday of a great aunt of hers of whom I had hitherto been unaware. It turns out she had a brother who was killed in WW1. There can't be many people left with siblings who fought in WW1. Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
The grandson of John Tyler is still alive.
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pension were being paid until 2020.
It’s at this point I point out that I have shaken the hand of a man whose mother once kissed Butch Cassidy. Indeed I think she did more than kiss him, but that was the polite family version of the anecdote
I met Princess Diana on Cardiff Central Station platform. She smiled knowingly at me and I smiled knowingly back. I was unaware she was only a few minutes from an apparent embrace from Will Carling. So in terms of the six stages of separation I am a mere two steps away from Will Carling.
The mother of my great first love at UCL, Julia Double-Barrelled, had a German mother who was KISSED BY HITLER AS A BABY. So I am only two steps away from Hitler
Why are you looking unsurprised?
Isn't that three steps? Julia, Julia's mum and then Hitler. Impressive nonetheless.
I don’t know how steps work
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
If kisses can count, I am only one link away from one of East 17.
I've Danced with a Man who's Danced with a Girl who's Danced with the Prince of Wales
They were more decorous, elliptical even, 100 years ago:
Me and Brian Mcfadden played the same Poker Tournament in Dublin 18 yrs ago. I was also briefly Tony Guoga (Who is really nice in real life) on his laptop playing as him on his own site, he's now a crypto bro having been an MEP.
Comments
This spider is critically endangered in the UK but is Least concern globally.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/dartford/news/conservationist-challenge-to-theme-park-proposals-241054/
I think violent thugs deserve time, but we see all the time people who are violent getting last warnings and not getting jail time. Especially repeat offenders of which Mr Amesbury isn't.
Clearly Culpability A based on the reports, I haven't seen enough to determine if it's likely to be Harm 1, 2 or 3 - but even Harm 1 doesn't require a custodial sentence and I'd be surprised if he got one.
The question of whether he and Starmer think he can ride out the storm if not actually liable to recall is an interesting one.
Putin, Xi, Trump... they and their ilk are all small men with vainglorious grand plans. It will only take one of them to trigger a catastrophe. But appeasing them will only make the potential catastrophe larger.
As a certain poster likes to put it... BRACE!!!
Also, The Railway Children.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbxS1MWraWs
Austen.
“I dare say you believed it; but I am by no means convinced that you would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be quite as dependent on chance as that of any man I know; and if, as you were mounting your horse, a friend were to say, ‘Bingley, you had better stay till next week,’ you would probably do it, you would probably not go — and at another word, might stay a month.”
Lawyers have the best ethics.
https://x.com/cjayanetti/status/1879854060817481930
BREAKING: The High Court has ruled the government's consultation into plans to slash billions of pounds from disability benefits claimants was unlawful
The case was brought by Ellen Clifford
They'd have been lucky to get 100 seats.
"For a nation’s balance of payments always balances. That is (with some slight technical adjustments),
Trade balance + Net inflows of capital = 0
I often run into people who believe that a successful economy, one achieving rapid productivity growth and leading in cutting-edge technology, will both run big trade surpluses because it’s so competitive and attract lots of foreign capital because it’s such a good investment. But that’s arithmetically impossible."
Why is this arithmetically impossible? Could a country not simply accumulate a great pile of wealth like an acquisitive dragon?
Also, I kinda feel like Krugman underplays the extent to which running a trade surplus (and then presumably investing in foreign assets to keep an overall balance) in the long term leads to a more prosperous country, while the opposite, leads to a more impoverished country.
At the time (as now) it was a practice that happened occasionally, causing serious injury for some.
https://archive.is/20240630164937/https://www.thetimes.com/article/whats-smug-and-deserves-to-be-decapitated-5k877kjgfpk
(ducks)
No I have never considered posting "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual, memorable or even (posts) worth reading for a fraction of a second". Why should I? Although I suspect readers are grateful that I don't attempt to achieve any of that by posting pictures of my holidays or inflammatory racial content.
If you don't like my dreary posts scroll past, everyone else does, and that is what I have taken to doing to all your "interesting, witty, insightful, engaging, wry, diverting, educational, comic, clever, intellectual (and) memorable" posts.
I find it hard to see Starmer being PM after the next election.
I think we can assume the AG does pick and choose his clients and he always picks the client that hates Britain
https://x.com/leftbrexit/status/1879565788107223353
Still nothing interesting or witty or original etc but I dare say one can salute the effort
https://www.barcouncil.org.uk/resource/cab-rank-rule-statement-of-the-four-bars.html
Obviously her brother was considerably older, but still.
So, regarding my posts why don't you just, in the words of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, "Walk on By"?
John Tyler was President of the USA between 1841 and 1845.
Civil war pensions were being paid until 2020.
Seriously. Don’t take it so seriously
It’s pointless banter on a tiny niche forum
I've been Brexity since long before it was unfashionable.
Maybe he has a conscience. We'll find out, I guess.
I have some regard for him (mainly based on his book East West Street and the related film) which took a bit of a knock when he associated himself with comedy Unionist outfit These Islands. Seems to have consciously decoupled from them so all tickety boo again.
Burt Bacharach was the composer and Hal David the Lyricist. Similar to Elton John and Bernie Taupin's relationship.
EDIT: It's an interesting piece of game theory.
1) Current State
a) Taiwan is the only source of high end microchips (some of)
b) If the Chinese invade, they plan to destroy the capability
c) Either this succeeds causing a hi-tech recession in every country, or China gets control and gets to dictate to other countries as it pleases
2) CHIPS act
a) -
b) -
c) If the destruction succeeds, the US is the sole supplier of theses chips. They can invoke devastating sanctions on China or anyone who allow smuggling on the chips to China. If the destruction doesn't succeed, then China can't use the chip supply to control international reaction.
Pictured, from earlier today: Taiwan's earliest locomotive, built in England in 1871, first used in Japan then transferred to their then colony.
I thought I'd dodged a bullet because I originally wrote "in the words of Dionne Warwick".
looks for a way to stay in power/avoid his trialclaims Hamas are seeking to "extort last minute concessions" so no vote to take place for the time being.https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/israeli-cabinet-vote-on-gaza-ceasefire-deal-postponed-as-netanyahu-accuses-hamas-of-seeking-to-extort-last-minute-concessions/ar-AA1xiRuC?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=9a678d9cc9e54b568c48612301da48e7&ei=24
Most excellent.
Their work is rather good.
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky
·
1h
🚨UPDATE
The implosion of the UK chemicals sector continued in Nov, according to this morning's data. Cumulative fall in output since 2021 is now 38% 👇
It's further evidence of continued UK deindustrialisation, in the face of high energy prices
Ed Conway @EdConwaySky
·
27m
Nor is this just a UK-specific trend.
Look at Germany, where both the chemicals sector and the wider energy intensive manufacturing sector have seen large falls in output in the past few years 👇
Europe is deindustrialising, and fast.
https://x.com/EdConwaySky
Why are you looking unsurprised?
RCS has mentioned before how easy it is to repurpose a tanker on its way to a higher bidder in Asia too.
Our energy policy and the legacy of previous govts, especially Merkel in Germany, has been shambolic.
Thankfully we have Ed Miliband in charge of our energy policy so we can be confident it will all be well shortly.
Labour are way over that line
If this is a willy waving contest, I can match that. I met Salim Bin Laden in the 1980s ( the one who killed himself in a Florida plane crash and whose English widow married his brother Abdullah. Salim was a half brother of Osama.
It was stupid joke to make and a stupid thing to do.
It makes you wary for a while but then you get into cycling your normal routes as normal. Taking it all for granted.
In my early teens* I was a bit of a starry-eyed Eurofederalist. My Europeanness was vague but informed by the imagery of Europe in the 1950s and 60s - I had a card game from the late 50s called 'Round Europe'. Imagery below (I've posted this before, but it encapsulates better than any other image how I'd like to feel about Europe). And films like 'Monte Carlo or bust'. THAT was my homeland.
But from my late teens onward head gradually overruled heart. The idea of Eurofederalism was attractive, but in my view not really compatible with good government. I went through the process many people who come to Euroscepticism do "Europe is wonderful!" to "Europe is wonderful but its government doesn't work in its populations' interests - perhaps it can be reformed and made to work" to "We've tried and failed. European government can never be made to work."
I did, as it happens, briefly have one foot in the Labour camp after 1992, when I thought Brian Gould might have a chance. Not that it would have helped them, as I was still too young to vote and that moment had passed by the time I got to 18.
Just my view, and I appreciate many on here do not agree.
*i.e. before I had actually been to mainland Europe - though I'm sure this is a coincidence.
I once fucked a girl who once fucked Eric Faulkner of the Bay City Rollers. Try and beat that
What? Too early? I dare say it’s 6.45pm somewhere and in fact I know it is. Because it’s 7.10pm and I just went up to the bar man here in Rangoon and I said “I dare say I’d like my usual gin and tonic”
I actually did it. And I’m now sitting here enjoying that gin and tonic with some deep fried chicken skin and chili in my exciting, lively hotel bar
I’ve been in the same hotel room as the one Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and David Cameron have all had sex in. Well slept in.
Also been in the same hotel room where David Cameron, Tony Blair, and Theresa May have used.
Bringing Ferry/Dylan to mind for some reason.
Twas a deep (deep)
A deep (deep)
A deep deep oh so deep
It was deep seat ... that was mined
We have attracted inward investment
You have sold off the family silver
Do you remember when this was a brilliant Viz meme? Ah, Viz. When it was funny… it was really very very funny
Anyway the meme was Lame-to-Claim Celebrity Anecdotes. I dare say yours is right up there, delivering pizza to the band members of Northern Uproar
I had a friend who used to go an NA meeting which was also attended by “the posh colonel” - that really obscure character from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum who had about two lines once every six episodes. And occasionally they would get the bass guitarist from the house band that appeared in the kids’ show Rainbow, in the distance behind Bungle and Zippy
I could never beat that
But I did once go to a pre-season soccer friendly in the non league. and told a young left back he was talented and should play professionally if he got the chance.
He thanked me, said he hoped he would and was most humble.
That chap was Chris Powell.
Zenyatta Mondatta ?
I was working at their concert as a volunteer charity collector back in the university RAG days, and we got given passes to the afterparty. It all got quite messy with a free bar until well after midnight.
They were more decorous, elliptical even, 100 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXndvWwZuaA