Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
I like @Leon but that required the type of response you highlight.
Oh Canada! With Trump and the power of Trump having been defeated, its time to listen to Carney. The previous US-led free trade world "is over". Instead of wazzocking around like Starmer trying to obsequiously crawl to defend this former world order we should ally with our brothers and sisters in Canada in building the new one.
We will butt lick Trump and continue circling the drain given the craven useless clowns running the UK
The most Trump-butt-licking party, Reform UK, are expected to win our next elections.
Maybe there's 25% who might like Farage/Trump/Brexit etc but there are 75% who loathe them and when it matters will do what's necessary
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I think in general Farage gets away with it because people are so unenthused by the big two and he knows to dial it back when Trump is particularly obnoxious. But Trump is only going to get worse and Farage cannot escape entirely that he and his core support are the only true Trump fans in the UK and that that is not a popular position even on the right.
Oh Canada! With Trump and the power of Trump having been defeated, its time to listen to Carney. The previous US-led free trade world "is over". Instead of wazzocking around like Starmer trying to obsequiously crawl to defend this former world order we should ally with our brothers and sisters in Canada in building the new one.
We will butt lick Trump and continue circling the drain given the craven useless clowns running the UK
The most Trump-butt-licking party, Reform UK, are expected to win our next elections.
As Canada will attest, six months is a geological epoch in politics. Where will Reform be if, for example, Farage has a serious health event before the election? The rest of them are low grade sack ferrets.
An embarrassment for Trump which is good. I'm a fan of Mark Carney. Full on anti Brexit which puts him in a different league to most current British politicians. Meanwhile I've just heard them say that Trump has the lowest opinion poll rating of any President at this stage in the last 80 years.
Can you please not comment on, like, anything until all the results are in ?
Some of us have money riding on this.
Are you now expecting a late win for the Cons after Roger's intervention?
Clearly Trudeau was massively unpopular and the twin effect of switching to Carney and the Trump mayhem has combined to boost the Liberal support. From what I can see the Conservatives have done well but the circumstances have allowed the Liberals to squeak through.
There are dangers for both parties, the danger for Conservatives in Canada is overanalysing the situation. Poilievre was clearly on to something but if the party decides his approach needs sweeping change it could retard efforts for the next election. The danger for the Liberals is that squeezing out a species of victory in unique circumstances will leave them highly vulnerable to a very rapid backlash if the electorate see stuff happening that prompts some buyers remorse.
I wonder if this is Canada's 1992.
Win an election after replacing an unpopular leader/defeating an unpopular LOTO which leads to a shellacking at the following GE.
It depends on the Conservatives.
If they ditch Pierre & Maple MAGAism, and go with a sensible centrist as party leader (who stays far far away from Jordan Peterson), then it'll be a landslide to Conservatives.
If, on the other hand, they become even more extreme right-wing, then it might be another close election.
The Canadian Conservatives are currently on 41% of the vote, their highest voteshare since 1988, so hardly a massive rejection of Poilievre extremism but a vote that in normal circumstances would see Poilievre win and get a majority government.
Only massive NDP tactical votes for the Liberals defeated him
Tactical voting is a natural consequence of one party putting forward a controversial candidate. Poilievre's Trump sympathies were enough this election to make that the key factor, coming from a position where the Liberal government was deeply unpopular and due a spell in opposition.
If parties don't want others to tactically vote against them, they need to be positioned accordingly.
If the Canadian Conservatives had been anti-Trump from the start in the same way Merz was in Germany, then they would have won very comfortably today.
Poilievre was anti Trump's tariffs, anti 51st state and pro Zelensky. Policy wise he was closer to Merz than Trump and Merz let us remember got less than 30% of the vote for the CDU even if still largest party and did not get a majority but has had to form another coalition with the SPD
Poilievre softened his tone in recent weeks but before that spewed out attacks on the media and threatened to defund the CBC . Not enough Canadians believed his new fluffy image .
But here’s the thing, while Farage has always been polarising, in these groups people who should be Reform converts were much more sceptical and lumped Farage in with other politicians, that they didn’t have faith he would actually change things.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
There is widespread discontent regarding living standards and migration. Regardless of which party is elected in which country that is pretty universal.
Wars tend to focus attention onto the Big Thing with the smaller annoyances swept aside. The US has launched a trade war against us and I think that focus is now swinging onto where we go from here and what the new world will look like.
Reconfigured global trade, increased defence spending, a push towards self-sufficiency away from dodgy bastards like Russia and the US. This offers the prospect of change which can positively affect people's daily grievances. If you offer the status quo in an election I can see how you would get beaten. Offer change? We can fix things.
Though a problem being that there are many millions of people doing well from the status quo.
Increased defence spending is a boost to the young but how many oldies would be willing to receive less so that could be funded ?
But here’s the thing, while Farage has always been polarising, in these groups people who should be Reform converts were much more sceptical and lumped Farage in with other politicians, that they didn’t have faith he would actually change things.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
I doubt that Horse. He just won't be able to stay away. I doubt he sees Trump's unpopularity. Nigel's news sources all believe Trump to be doing a sterling job.
And it looks as though the populist media are still backing him all the way. Even if RefUK were to get a fairly ho-hum result this Thursday, I think we can expect wall-to-wall "Farage set to be PM" coverage next weekend. There is an agenda at work here even if, in reality, it's pretty much nonsense.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
I doubt that Horse. He just won't be able to stay away. I doubt he sees Trump's unpopularity. Nigel's news sources all believe Trump to be doing a sterling job.
He knows. But if he is not fawning to Trump enough he will lose some online backing and risk the man turning against him directly.
But that day is not here yet. Goid results put off that reckoning.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
There is widespread discontent regarding living standards and migration. Regardless of which party is elected in which country that is pretty universal.
Wars tend to focus attention onto the Big Thing with the smaller annoyances swept aside. The US has launched a trade war against us and I think that focus is now swinging onto where we go from here and what the new world will look like.
Reconfigured global trade, increased defence spending, a push towards self-sufficiency away from dodgy bastards like Russia and the US. This offers the prospect of change which can positively affect people's daily grievances. If you offer the status quo in an election I can see how you would get beaten. Offer change? We can fix things.
Though a problem being that there are many millions of people doing well from the status quo.
Increased defence spending is a boost to the young but how many oldies would be willing to receive less so that could be funded ?
Coda, i'm more convinced after these groups that Trump is a real problem for Reform among would be converts, Zelenskyy meeting still comes up & closeness to Putin, but also image of Trump's chaos/dysfunction are clearly red lines - even for many of the most disillusioned with our status quo.
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I think in general Farage gets away with it because people are so unenthused by the big two and he knows to dial it back when Trump is particularly obnoxious. But Trump is only going to get worse and Farage cannot escape entirely that he and his core support are the only true Trump fans in the UK and that that is not a popular position even on the right.
Kemi needs to remind the voters every day how firmly Farage is placed up Trump's rectum. That photo in the golden lift should be pure gold for everybody fighting Reform...
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
I doubt that Horse. He just won't be able to stay away. I doubt he sees Trump's unpopularity. Nigel's news sources all believe Trump to be doing a sterling job.
And it looks as though the populist media are still backing him all the way. Even if RefUK were to get a fairly ho-hum result this Thursday, I think we can expect wall-to-wall "Farage set to be PM" coverage next weekend. There is an agenda at work here even if, in reality, it's pretty much nonsense.
It's not even populist media, the mainstream media are over him like a rash for some mindless opinion on immigration and he's almost appeared on more Question Times than Fiona Bruce
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
It wasn't really a betrayal because the brexitwave of immigration from non-culturally adjacent sources was inevitable, foreseen and obvious to anybody who didn't have a St George's fleg in their FB profile and a tiny front garden full of rusty mountain bikes.
By the time NHS procurement get involved a £15 bottle from Aldi will have cost the taxpayer a thousand pounds. It'll be like paracetamol. 37 pence for 16 in Home Bargains and a tenner to the NHS purchasing directly from big pharma.
When my late father was being delivered his weekly cocktail of cancer and Parkinson's drugs I checked out the cost of paracetamol to the NHS and it was absurdly expensive. I cancelled them and bought them myself from the supermarket instead. The cost to the NHS for otherwise over the counter drugs on prescription was outrageous.
Surely down to the cost of prescription, distribution and dispensing?
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
I don't think he did too badly
Maybe so, and really unforeseen happenings he could not overcome.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
This is basically why the Tories are down at 20% in the polls. Forget everything else, it was Boris allowing 2m+ people into the country from Africa and and South Asia that has killed Tory electoral chances for a generation. People voted leave to cut immigration and the Tories pushed it up 5x and many from countries and cultures we'd consider hostile to our own.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
It wasn't really a betrayal because the brexitwave of immigration from non-culturally adjacent sources was inevitable, foreseen and obvious to anybody who didn't have a St George's fleg in their FB profile and a tiny front garden full of rusty mountain bikes.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
By the time NHS procurement get involved a £15 bottle from Aldi will have cost the taxpayer a thousand pounds. It'll be like paracetamol. 37 pence for 16 in Home Bargains and a tenner to the NHS purchasing directly from big pharma.
When my late father was being delivered his weekly cocktail of cancer and Parkinson's drugs I checked out the cost of paracetamol to the NHS and it was absurdly expensive. I cancelled them and bought them myself from the supermarket instead. The cost to the NHS for otherwise over the counter drugs on prescription was outrageous.
Surely down to the cost of prescription, distribution and dispensing?
Maybe, but I'd rather the cost of the paracetamol put back into the NHS pot than the pockets of Boots or Lloyds chemist shareholders.
Here in Wales we have free prescriptions and that is a licence to print money alongside their repeat prescriptions for pharmaceutical retailers. If I was allowed to sell on all that excess Tramadol I could have bought a decent holiday. Instead it was returned to the retailer for disposal.
Didn’t somebody post a poll that said the Liberals would lose based on who their neighbours were voting for? Maybe it only works in the US?
Or not all measures work as indicators each time as elections are multi faceted and it might have still meant they did better than sone predicted.
The breakdowns in the poll by party were:
Conservative voters: 83% think their neighbours were also voting Conservative
Liberal voters: 75% think their neighbours were also voting Liberal
NDP voters: Only 45% think their neighbours were also voting NDP. 24% think their neighbours are voting Liberal & 21% think they are voting Conservative.
To me, the poll just showed the extent to which NDP voters were willing to vote tactically. If they believed that their neighbours were likely to vote Liberal or Conservative, then they would be more likely to vote Liberal in order to keep out the Conservatives.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
3) Put the cables underground? (Not my preference but an option surely.)
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Ironically it could be Ontario that fails to deliver for the LPC .
There are so many seats there with razor thin margins but currently the CPC is hanging on .
What's the relationship between the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario that seems to be running a happy ship in the Province and the federal Conservative Party led by Poilievre?
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
This is basically why the Tories are down at 20% in the polls. Forget everything else, it was Boris allowing 2m+ people into the country from Africa and and South Asia that has killed Tory electoral chances for a generation. People voted leave to cut immigration and the Tories pushed it up 5x and many from countries and cultures we'd consider hostile to our own.
I don't think that's quite right. If you asked people on the street where they thought the 2 million immigrants came from, very few people would accurately list Nigeria, India, China. They certainly wouldn't describe them as hostile, with the exception of Pakistan perhaps.
I think most people would immediately think of the small boats. And probably not come up with an actual nationality - "boats people" is now a nationality in itself, and a supremely hostile one.
Let us not forget the Canadian Conservatives are up 9% on the last Canadian election and have also gained seats too.
It is not so much being close to Trump has damaged them, Poilievre was not Maga enough for Trump anyway, more the threat of Trump's tariffs and annexation talk has united the Canadian left and liberals behind the Liberal Party. Hence the collapse in the NDP vote via tactical votes for Carney's Liberals
True but getting third parties to hate your opposition more than they hate you is part of the political skillset that Poilievre doesn't have.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
2) already happens to an extent. Look how offshore wind cables run into the infrastructure that was formerly (or currently) used for nuclear, gas, coal power stations.
But here’s the thing, while Farage has always been polarising, in these groups people who should be Reform converts were much more sceptical and lumped Farage in with other politicians, that they didn’t have faith he would actually change things.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I didn't flag you.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
I'll be honest, didn't even realise Mark Carney was on the left before he announced he was running for the leadership of the grits, I'd got him mentally associated as a Cameroon conservative due to his BoE tenure here.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
Interesting choice of name.
I'm trying to remember if the Greeks were there first.... I think they were.
Also, I hope you can find a suitably ancient site for your photo of the day.
Edited extra: for those not into the Eastern Roman Empire (Gasp!), Byzantion's the Greek name for what gets Latinised to Byzantium. Which is also Constantinople, and Mikligard, and is now Istanbul.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Wouldnt be a surprise if Trump goes after the pollsters in a serious way.
I'll be honest, didn't even realise Mark Carney was on the left before he announced he was running for the leadership of the grits, I'd got him mentally associated as a Cameroon conservative due to his BoE tenure here.
The overlap between left and right in Canada is not quite the same as in the UK, even if it's nothing like as skewed to the right as the US is.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I didn't flag you.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
Yes dear, whatever you say
On topic the Kirghiz are lovely people but I have never encountered a culture with such a tenuous grasp of “queuing”
I'll be honest, didn't even realise Mark Carney was on the left before he announced he was running for the leadership of the grits, I'd got him mentally associated as a Cameroon conservative due to his BoE tenure here.
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
My guess is that Carney’s administration will be rather like John Major’s. They won an election, which they ought to have lost, but with a small majority (if you include the NDP). And, they’re at the point where governments get tired, inept, corrupt, and MP’s go off- piste.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
This is basically why the Tories are down at 20% in the polls. Forget everything else, it was Boris allowing 2m+ people into the country from Africa and and South Asia that has killed Tory electoral chances for a generation. People voted leave to cut immigration and the Tories pushed it up 5x and many from countries and cultures we'd consider hostile to our own.
I don't think that's quite right. If you asked people on the street where they thought the 2 million immigrants came from, very few people would accurately list Nigeria, India, China. They certainly wouldn't describe them as hostile, with the exception of Pakistan perhaps.
I think most people would immediately think of the small boats. And probably not come up with an actual nationality - "boats people" is now a nationality in itself, and a supremely hostile one.
In reality the immigrants tended to be:
1) Exorbitant fee paying students 2) Health and social care workers 3) Hong Kongers with money 4) Ukrainians
All of which could be explained and defended.
But the Conservatives didn't and instead obsessed about 'boat people' and then did nothing to stop them.
My SMPQ for the day. Cyclists and wheelchair users round here are required to be physically dextrous. Even a Tramper would not get up that. I think it is a sign that has been misdirected in some respects since about 2011. Now: https://maps.app.goo.gl/B17obf29bHXj5Akz6
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
3) Put the cables underground? (Not my preference but an option surely.)
An Option, but ALWAYS a bad one, only to be done when it can't be avoided for mainly landscape reasons. When an "Expert" advocates undergrounding you know he isn't an expert in anything other than bullshitting.
Undergrounding electricty supply conductors is very different from undergrounding telephone / broadband fibres.
There are rules as to how far apart they have to be and what depth etc etc AND unlike most rules these are all very sensible, least you can safely get away with rules, not gold plated extreme unlikely situation rules.
The landscape destruction is enormous. But it looks just the same afterwards - no it doesn't and undergound it certainly isn't. It costs 4 or 5 times as much but whereas the overhead corridor is about 60 to 80 yds, the underground corridor is at least 200 yds for highest tension. Have to be 100yds apart to prevent accidental shorting, conductor to underground water to forgotten metal pipe and back to the other conductor - not good obviously.
But the biggest problem is when there is a problem break etc. With overhead a visual inspection can find the break within 5 or 10 minutes. Repair can then be undertaken and completed within 3 hrs at most. Undergrounding, where is the break ??? Unless the problem has resulted in say a house being destroyed by fire it will take one day to work out within half a mile where the problem is and then days finding the actual fault, with lots of test pits etc etc.
The only advantage of undergrounding is, if it is done properly then a fault is much more unlikely.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Wouldnt be a surprise if Trump goes after the pollsters in a serious way.
President Donald Trump has said pollsters that have shown his approval ratings sliding in recent weeks should be investigated for "election fraud."
Trump cited recent polls from The New York Times, ABC News/The Washington Post, and Fox News, which put his approval rating on 42 percent, 39 percent, and 44 percent respectively.
Responding to the polls, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: "They are negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win elections big, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse."
By the time NHS procurement get involved a £15 bottle from Aldi will have cost the taxpayer a thousand pounds. It'll be like paracetamol. 37 pence for 16 in Home Bargains and a tenner to the NHS purchasing directly from big pharma.
When my late father was being delivered his weekly cocktail of cancer and Parkinson's drugs I checked out the cost of paracetamol to the NHS and it was absurdly expensive. I cancelled them and bought them myself from the supermarket instead. The cost to the NHS for otherwise over the counter drugs on prescription was outrageous.
Similarly, 5% preservative free saline solution eye drops - which are fantastic, and apparently unavailable at all retail. Cost about £15 for 10ml to the NHS.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I didn't flag you.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
Yes dear, whatever you say
On topic the Kirghiz are lovely people but I have never encountered a culture with such a tenuous grasp of “queuing”
Wait until you get exposed to the French and Italian ski-lift culture. You will pray for the unruly Gin and Tonic queue in downtown Bishkek.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Wouldnt be a surprise if Trump goes after the pollsters in a serious way.
President Donald Trump has said pollsters that have shown his approval ratings sliding in recent weeks should be investigated for "election fraud."
Trump cited recent polls from The New York Times, ABC News/The Washington Post, and Fox News, which put his approval rating on 42 percent, 39 percent, and 44 percent respectively.
Responding to the polls, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: "They are negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win elections big, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse."
THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Wouldnt be a surprise if Trump goes after the pollsters in a serious way.
President Donald Trump has said pollsters that have shown his approval ratings sliding in recent weeks should be investigated for "election fraud."
Trump cited recent polls from The New York Times, ABC News/The Washington Post, and Fox News, which put his approval rating on 42 percent, 39 percent, and 44 percent respectively.
Responding to the polls, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: "They are negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win elections big, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse."
THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
He is just such a twat.
The world should ban the use of the word "Trump". Jut refer to the President, if you bothered reporting him at all. THAT is the way to get to him. Ignoring him.
I'll be honest, didn't even realise Mark Carney was on the left before he announced he was running for the leadership of the grits, I'd got him mentally associated as a Cameroon conservative due to his BoE tenure here.
I had the impression from some posters on here that Cameron was a traitorous EU luvvin Marxist. I’m pretty sure Carney is about as leftwing as Cameron, ie not very.
Oh Canada! With Trump and the power of Trump having been defeated, its time to listen to Carney. The previous US-led free trade world "is over". Instead of wazzocking around like Starmer trying to obsequiously crawl to defend this former world order we should ally with our brothers and sisters in Canada in building the new one.
We will butt lick Trump and continue circling the drain given the craven useless clowns running the UK
The most Trump-butt-licking party, Reform UK, are expected to win our next elections.
As Canada will attest, six months is a geological epoch in politics. Where will Reform be if, for example, Farage has a serious health event before the election? The rest of them are low grade sack ferrets.
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I didn't flag you.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
Yes dear, whatever you say
On topic the Kirghiz are lovely people but I have never encountered a culture with such a tenuous grasp of “queuing”
Wait until you get exposed to the French and Italian ski-lift culture. You will pray for the unruly Gin and Tonic queue in downtown Bishkek.
On the other hand, those Kirghiz cheekbones….
My Pegasus plane from Bishkek is sharing a luggage carousel with an incoming plane from Medine, Saudi Arabia. The contrast in pulchritude is startling
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
This is basically why the Tories are down at 20% in the polls. Forget everything else, it was Boris allowing 2m+ people into the country from Africa and and South Asia that has killed Tory electoral chances for a generation. People voted leave to cut immigration and the Tories pushed it up 5x and many from countries and cultures we'd consider hostile to our own.
The hilarious bit being that it was exactly what Boris and the save our curry houses end of Brexit promised to do.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
A party that opposes the pylons being built from Norwich to Tilbury will clean up. It’s the one thing that seems to unite people of all political persuasions round here. People would rather higher energy bills than the neighbourhood ruined
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
The government is subsidising a new-build CCGT (with carbon capture) on Teesside. However, I am not aware of any plans for a data centre cluster in Redcar.
There may be another in North Wales (if it gets picked by DESNZ); again, where are the data centres?
Politically, I see the Canadian's choice as poor, but like the loveless victory of Sir Potato, perhaps necessary to bury centrism for all time.
Excellent. If you think that it gives me confidence that centrism will soon be in the ascendant again.
Britain, and indeed can the West as a whole, is fundamentally centrist.
There is no such thing as being fundamentally centrist, that's a contradiction in terms. Centrism doesn't have a foundation, it consists being being prey to the prevailing political trends of the day, no matter how ludicrous, and selling that turd to the public as if it's a privilege to be Governed so wisely and cleverly.
Oh, writing that I realise we are fundamentally centrist.
Clearly Trudeau was massively unpopular and the twin effect of switching to Carney and the Trump mayhem has combined to boost the Liberal support. From what I can see the Conservatives have done well but the circumstances have allowed the Liberals to squeak through.
There are dangers for both parties, the danger for Conservatives in Canada is overanalysing the situation. Poilievre was clearly on to something but if the party decides his approach needs sweeping change it could retard efforts for the next election. The danger for the Liberals is that squeezing out a species of victory in unique circumstances will leave them highly vulnerable to a very rapid backlash if the electorate see stuff happening that prompts some buyers remorse.
I wonder if this is Canada's 1992.
Win an election after replacing an unpopular leader/defeating an unpopular LOTO which leads to a shellacking at the following GE.
It depends on the Conservatives.
If they ditch Pierre & Maple MAGAism, and go with a sensible centrist as party leader (who stays far far away from Jordan Peterson), then it'll be a landslide to Conservatives.
If, on the other hand, they become even more extreme right-wing, then it might be another close election.
The Canadian Conservatives are currently on 41% of the vote, their highest voteshare since 1988, so hardly a massive rejection of Poilievre extremism but a vote that in normal circumstances would see Poilievre win and get a majority government.
Only massive NDP tactical votes for the Liberals defeated him
Tactical voting is a natural consequence of one party putting forward a controversial candidate. Poilievre's Trump sympathies were enough this election to make that the key factor, coming from a position where the Liberal government was deeply unpopular and due a spell in opposition.
If parties don't want others to tactically vote against them, they need to be positioned accordingly.
If the Canadian Conservatives had been anti-Trump from the start in the same way Merz was in Germany, then they would have won very comfortably today.
Interesting point. Partly it's related to turnout. On low turnout, radical parties can win; but if they appear to be winning and are perceived as radical, they lose to normally apathetic centrists.
In this country, Reform are now showing up with quite a few posters in deprived areas, and I think they'll do pretty well as they aren't perceived as wildly radical, merely "new". I think it's important to show them as radical opportunists without any kimd of serious programme - ignoring them doesn't really work.
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
Well, the core Conservative demographic is now so small that the Tories will be most likely fourth on Thursday. They need new ideas to attract new voters, or the grim reaper will come for the Party itself, not just the membership.
The West is still very divided and I am not sure, short of a major war, how it can be fixed.
Destroy the Internet.
IMV a massive issue is people being sold simple 'solutions' to complex problems. We saw this with Brexit, where we were told all the ills of the country were down to the EU. Then we left, and the problems remained. Therefore many of the Brexiteers shout "It was done wrong!!!!", and move onto the next issue that's the cause of all the ills: immigration.
They're simple answers that will make little difference to complex problems. But the nature of the Internet sells the simple soundbite-style solutions well, and complex solutions are hard to sell.
Also, enemies can use the Internet to divide the public. Make much of nonsensical wedge issues to divide, often using the 'other' as a target. It's not your fault - it's *their* fault. Hate your fellow countryman, not us.
People voted for Brexit for many reeasons - but I don't think it's particularly controversial to say that some people voted Brexit because of immigration. Which hasn't come down. So they are still quite strongly against immigration.
And they're not against immigration because it's presented as a magic bullet to the country's ills. They're against it because we've had more immigration in the last 25 years than at any point, ever, in our island's history, in either relative or absolute terms - and there is no polity anywhere in the world, ever, who will look up and say 'ooh, look, lots of people with a different culture arriving! Brilliant!'
This is supercharged by where those post-Brexit immigrants are perceived to be coming from.
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
This is basically why the Tories are down at 20% in the polls. Forget everything else, it was Boris allowing 2m+ people into the country from Africa and and South Asia that has killed Tory electoral chances for a generation. People voted leave to cut immigration and the Tories pushed it up 5x and many from countries and cultures we'd consider hostile to our own.
The hilarious bit being that it was exactly what Boris and the save our curry houses end of Brexit promised to do.
Good that after several years of any suggestion that immigration was a factor in Brexit was met by a chorus of ‘how dare you suggest Brexiteers are racist!’, now everyone is more or less on the same page. I recall one particularly fatuous meme that brown, black and yellow people replacing EU immigrants proved that Brexit was an anti-racist project *stifles laughter*
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
Could you have a less credible or less serious way to run politics than pandering to NIMBY Facebook groups? Or any Facebook groups for that matter.
Anyone pandering to that isn't serious or fit for office.
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
Well, the core Conservative demographic is now so small that the Tories will be most likely fourth on Thursday. They need new ideas to attract new voters, or the grim reaper will come for the Party itself, not just the membership.
I'm just not convinced a policy that simultaneously drives more people to Reform and to nimby Lib Dems is a brilliant idea. The renting, Labour/Green voting class does not strike me as an obvious source of new Conservatives to replace those voters.
It's very difficult to see a route out for the Conservatives.
A friend tells me renewable energy (namely failing to switch the grid over to gas supply for a rest period) is responsible for the Iberian blackouts.
Unless you're referring to 'a friend' in the 'a spy' meaning then I'd not place too much weight on it without other credentials.
I had a friend who believed in the power of crystals and that chlorination and fluoridation of drinking water were a plot to kill the masses*. I distanced myself a bit when I realised he was a total loon.
It will be interesting with the blackouts whether it turns out to be some stupid cockup somewhere or a rare and previously unexperienced manifestation of physics asserting itself over engineering.
*to be fair, chlorination is a mass murder exercise when it comes to waterbourne pathogens, but I don't think that's what he meant.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
A party that opposes the pylons being built from Norwich to Tilbury will clean up. It’s the one thing that seems to unite people of all political persuasions round here. People would rather higher energy bills than the neighbourhood ruined
Good morning all. Fine bright morning on the new pylon route, excellent for the workers!
My impression here is that while there are some who will lie down in front of bulldozers, or whatever, there are quite a few who are resigned to the line or indeed accept it as necessary for progress. For the avoidance of doubt I'm in the latter category!
Good Canadian election coverage throughout the early hours on PB. A shout out to RCS and Casino (foiling the Leon hijack was swift and brutal) among others.
The Leon hijack??? My god you’re obsessed
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I didn't flag you.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
Yes dear, whatever you say
On topic the Kirghiz are lovely people but I have never encountered a culture with such a tenuous grasp of “queuing”
Wait until you get exposed to the French and Italian ski-lift culture. You will pray for the unruly Gin and Tonic queue in downtown Bishkek.
A fair proportion of that lift queue wont be french or Italian... as a foot out practitioner I've had to be careful not stand on the back of skis sometimes. Youngest was literally trampled under skis by a grown adult on a narrow footbridge a couple of weeks ago.
Davey congratulates Carney on winning the election and points out that voters in England have an opportunity on Thursday to do the same by voting against the Trump "bootlicker" Nigel Farage
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
Well, the core Conservative demographic is now so small that the Tories will be most likely fourth on Thursday. They need new ideas to attract new voters, or the grim reaper will come for the Party itself, not just the membership.
I'm just not convinced a policy that simultaneously drives more people to Reform and to nimby Lib Dems is a brilliant idea. The renting, Labour/Green voting class does not strike me as an obvious source of new Conservatives to replace those voters.
It's very difficult to see a route out for the Conservatives.
The key is to get much more housing built so that the renting class have a route out of renting and can become home owners instead.
Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.
Didn’t somebody post a poll that said the Liberals would lose based on who their neighbours were voting for? Maybe it only works in the US?
Or not all measures work as indicators each time as elections are multi faceted and it might have still meant they did better than sone predicted.
We strive to find order in the chaos that is elections. In the UK its 650 individual contests. And we do foolish things such as analyse old data, produce a 'fit' and then extrapolate onwards. We like to assume that there is some underlying order, if only we could find it. And the reality is that we cab find broad scale data, but we cannot ever truly refine predictions down to the level of the result itself.
Farage I suspect will wisely keep himself away from Trump going forward.
With the state of Trump's polling, everybody will.
I wonder if Trump will try to fix the polling with some sort of presidential order at some point? 'Clearly anti-American' to publish such findings after all.
Wouldnt be a surprise if Trump goes after the pollsters in a serious way.
President Donald Trump has said pollsters that have shown his approval ratings sliding in recent weeks should be investigated for "election fraud."
Trump cited recent polls from The New York Times, ABC News/The Washington Post, and Fox News, which put his approval rating on 42 percent, 39 percent, and 44 percent respectively.
Responding to the polls, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: "They are negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win elections big, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse."
THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!
He is just such a twat.
The world should ban the use of the word "Trump". Jut refer to the President, if you bothered reporting him at all. THAT is the way to get to him. Ignoring him.
Many Germans have a problem distinguishing between e.g. Harry and hurry, between the short "a" and "u" vowels. say these two at a normal "English tempo" and over half will say they can't hear the difference, or have no idea which is which.
This mix-up some times leaks into speaking these vowels as well.
Last were there was a CDU politition who regularly called the US President "TRAMP"
Didn't expect the Pollievre result, should have listened.
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Sorry, but the housing thing is a dreadful idea. The Conservatives should stay well clear. From my observations of Facebook groups in Edinburgh, you get a toxic mix of:
destroying our green and pleasant land
you only need this housing because of our record immigration
depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.
Could you have a less credible or less serious way to run politics than pandering to NIMBY Facebook groups? Or any Facebook groups for that matter.
Anyone pandering to that isn't serious or fit for office.
Round our way it’s anti-LTN Facebook that think they set the political weather.
We’ll find out whether they’re right in a few days...
Politically, I see the Canadian's choice as poor, but like the loveless victory of Sir Potato, perhaps necessary to bury centrism for all time.
Excellent. If you think that it gives me confidence that centrism will soon be in the ascendant again.
Britain, and indeed can the West as a whole, is fundamentally centrist.
There is no such thing as being fundamentally centrist, that's a contradiction in terms. Centrism doesn't have a foundation, it consists being being prey to the prevailing political trends of the day, no matter how ludicrous, and selling that turd to the public as if it's a privilege to be Governed so wisely and cleverly.
Oh, writing that I realise we are fundamentally centrist.
The nature of western centrism is quite clear, and huge in scope. It's the post war consensus WRT the western alliance, NATO, big cradle to grave welfare state, pensions, regulated private enterprise, freedom of religion and opinion, universal health care not based on means, free education to 18, separation of powers, rule of law, aversion to violence. It is basically social democracy.
Even Reform have no public plans to change this. Trump does have such plans, hence the fracas.
The real political issues in the west have been competence, manner of delivery and the narcissism of small differences.
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
I still don't get your 5 strikes and out thing.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them. 1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored 2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
Five strikes and out is doing several things.
1) LOOK AT ME! 2) Limiting the time he/she is wasting posting on PB (a lesson for us all) 3) Not allowing engagement - PB works best with conversations, not just isolated posts.
Comments
Last year there was talk about what our Tories could learn from him, and i believe he talked about housing a lot. Hopefulky any lessons ours take will not reflect on that point and go super nimby instead.
Didn’t somebody post a poll that said the Liberals would lose based on who their neighbours were voting for? Maybe it only works in the US?
But here’s the thing, while Farage has always been polarising, in these groups people who should be Reform converts were much more sceptical and lumped Farage in with other politicians, that they didn’t have faith he would actually change things.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1916967084417847634
As I’ve pointed out many times, Farage is not popular.
Increased defence spending is a boost to the young but how many oldies would be willing to receive less so that could be funded ?
If it were a million Australians, Canadians - even Europeans - I don't think it would be as problematic. You might not be a big fan of Poles and Lithuanians coming over, but at least these are white people from nominally Christian countries.
If you voted for Brexit to preserve your "culture", you will feel that you have been comprehensively betrayed by our subsequent immigration policy. It's factually wrong, but the perception is we've swapped young Europeans, here on a legal basis, for "boat people".
There is an agenda at work here even if, in reality, it's pretty much nonsense.
But that day is not here yet. Goid results put off that reckoning.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1917119922045325398
Coda, i'm more convinced after these groups that Trump is a real problem for Reform among would be converts, Zelenskyy meeting still comes up & closeness to Putin, but also image of Trump's chaos/dysfunction are clearly red lines - even for many of the most disillusioned with our status quo.
@omerlev
FYI, the Marxist-Leninist party of Canada is beating the Communist party of Canada by slightly more than 400 votes
I can imagine many in vulnerable districts might want Trump to stick to the anti-woke and anti-immigration line. And to STFU about everything else.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/23/farage-trump-buddy-photo-ukip
There are so many seats there with razor thin margins but currently the CPC is hanging on .
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/29/labour-to-press-on-with-pylons-as-study-shows-underground-cables-more-costly
Reform are the NIMBY party, we’ve had pylons for decades and they want to stop them being built.
This is what I mean when I say whatever Labour try to do, the NIMBY establishment will oppose at any turn. They really need to tell them where to go.
And with that, fin.
But media are not the only ones who overreact.
WRT pylons, there are two ways to avoid them.
1) Build high-use energy industries near to the power generation source. Instead of cast pylons to carry energy from Scotland down to the Varsity Crescent for datacentres, build those in Aberdeenshire where the power is onshored
2) Build power generation where the pylons already are. As you can't build renewables in Nottinghamshire etc that means building coal / gas which takes time and leaves us reliant on the forrin
Fukkers have a third way - don't bother with woke things like AI datacentres or anything else which needs power. Nor do you have to actually reopen the coal mines or rebuild the coal power stations - you just chant Net Zero is woke and mysteriously we're transported back to 1978!
Here in Wales we have free prescriptions and that is a licence to print money alongside their repeat prescriptions for pharmaceutical retailers. If I was allowed to sell on all that excess Tramadol I could have bought a decent holiday. Instead it was returned to the retailer for disposal.
Conservative voters: 83% think their neighbours were also voting Conservative
Liberal voters: 75% think their neighbours were also voting Liberal
NDP voters: Only 45% think their neighbours were also voting NDP. 24% think their neighbours are voting Liberal & 21% think they are voting Conservative.
To me, the poll just showed the extent to which NDP voters were willing to vote tactically. If they believed that their neighbours were likely to vote Liberal or Conservative, then they would be more likely to vote Liberal in order to keep out the Conservatives.
https://davidcoletto.substack.com/p/what-do-you-think-your-neighbours
Go back and look again, I was having a joke at the expense of all of us pb-ers (me included) geekily glued to the minutiae of an election in a foreign country (and not even the USA)
Good morning to all from a very sunny Byzantion
I think most people would immediately think of the small boats. And probably not come up with an actual nationality - "boats people" is now a nationality in itself, and a supremely hostile one.
Britain, and indeed can the West as a whole, is fundamentally centrist.
And no, the comedy excuse was your backpedaling after you were comprehensively slapped down by Casino.
I'm trying to remember if the Greeks were there first.... I think they were.
Also, I hope you can find a suitably ancient site for your photo of the day.
Edited extra: for those not into the Eastern Roman Empire (Gasp!), Byzantion's the Greek name for what gets Latinised to Byzantium. Which is also Constantinople, and Mikligard, and is now Istanbul.
On topic the Kirghiz are lovely people but I have
never encountered a culture with such a tenuous grasp of “queuing”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrvx04e1e6o
"Kneecap apologises to families of two murdered MPs"
Not awfully punk.
- destroying our green and pleasant land
- you only need this housing because of our record immigration
- depressing house values for "poor" pensioners
House building hurts every core Conservative demographic.1) Exorbitant fee paying students
2) Health and social care workers
3) Hong Kongers with money
4) Ukrainians
All of which could be explained and defended.
But the Conservatives didn't and instead obsessed about 'boat people' and then did nothing to stop them.
My SMPQ for the day. Cyclists and wheelchair users round here are required to be physically dextrous. Even a Tramper would not get up that.
I think it is a sign that has been misdirected in some respects since about 2011.
Now: https://maps.app.goo.gl/B17obf29bHXj5Akz6
There's some sort of panel sign facing the hedge even when the signpost was brand new - it was not there in 2009:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/K9LLypqo6HSewfMV7
Did someone say "Maintenance Budget".
Undergrounding electricty supply conductors is very different from undergrounding telephone / broadband fibres.
There are rules as to how far apart they have to be and what depth etc etc AND unlike most rules these are all very sensible, least you can safely get away with rules, not gold plated extreme unlikely situation rules.
The landscape destruction is enormous. But it looks just the same afterwards - no it doesn't and undergound it certainly isn't. It costs 4 or 5 times as much but whereas the overhead corridor is about 60 to 80 yds, the underground corridor is at least 200 yds for highest tension. Have to be 100yds apart to prevent accidental shorting, conductor to underground water to forgotten metal pipe and back to the other conductor - not good obviously.
But the biggest problem is when there is a problem break etc. With overhead a visual inspection can find the break within 5 or 10 minutes. Repair can then be undertaken and completed within 3 hrs at most. Undergrounding, where is the break ??? Unless the problem has resulted in say a house being destroyed by fire it will take one day to work out within half a mile where the problem is and then days finding the actual fault, with lots of test pits etc etc.
The only advantage of undergrounding is, if it is done properly then a fault is much more unlikely.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-demands-investigations-negative-approval-rating-polls-2064949
President Donald Trump has said pollsters that have shown his approval ratings sliding in recent weeks should be investigated for "election fraud."
Trump cited recent polls from The New York Times, ABC News/The Washington Post, and Fox News, which put his approval rating on 42 percent, 39 percent, and 44 percent respectively.
Responding to the polls, Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: "They are negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I win elections big, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse."
Wait until you get exposed to the French and Italian ski-lift culture. You will pray for the unruly Gin and Tonic queue in downtown Bishkek.
The world should ban the use of the word "Trump". Jut refer to the President, if you bothered reporting him at all. THAT is the way to get to him. Ignoring him.
I’m pretty sure Carney is about as leftwing as Cameron, ie not very.
My Pegasus plane from Bishkek is sharing a luggage carousel with an incoming plane from Medine, Saudi Arabia. The contrast in pulchritude is startling
There may be another in North Wales (if it gets picked by DESNZ); again, where are the data centres?
Oh, writing that I realise we are fundamentally centrist.
In this country, Reform are now showing up with quite a few posters in deprived areas, and I think they'll do pretty well as they aren't perceived as wildly radical, merely "new". I think it's important to show them as radical opportunists without any kimd of serious programme - ignoring them doesn't really work.
I recall one particularly fatuous meme that brown, black and yellow people replacing EU immigrants proved that Brexit was an anti-racist project *stifles laughter*
Anyone pandering to that isn't serious or fit for office.
264/266 reported.
It's very difficult to see a route out for the Conservatives.
I had a friend who believed in the power of crystals and that chlorination and fluoridation of drinking water were a plot to kill the masses*. I distanced myself a bit when I realised he was a total loon.
It will be interesting with the blackouts whether it turns out to be some stupid cockup somewhere or a rare and previously unexperienced manifestation of physics asserting itself over engineering.
*to be fair, chlorination is a mass murder exercise when it comes to waterbourne pathogens, but I don't think that's what he meant.
My impression here is that while there are some who will lie down in front of bulldozers, or whatever, there are quite a few who are resigned to the line or indeed accept it as necessary for progress.
For the avoidance of doubt I'm in the latter category!
Youngest was literally trampled under skis by a grown adult on a narrow footbridge a couple of weeks ago.
https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/1917133448780693674
Probably the exceptional atmospheric conditions
Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.
This mix-up some times leaks into speaking these vowels as well.
Last were there was a CDU politition who regularly called the US President "TRAMP"
We’ll find out whether they’re right in a few days...
Even Reform have no public plans to change this. Trump does have such plans, hence the fracas.
The real political issues in the west have been competence, manner of delivery and the narcissism of small differences.
1) LOOK AT ME!
2) Limiting the time he/she is wasting posting on PB (a lesson for us all)
3) Not allowing engagement - PB works best with conversations, not just isolated posts.