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Apologies if this polling triggers Brexiteers – politicalbetting.com
Apologies if this polling triggers Brexiteers – politicalbetting.com
When did Britain start to go wrong? In @NewStatesman @georgeeaton looks at our polling of when the public think our turn for the worst was. Brexit tops the list, but different voters disagree. Reform voters most likely to pick Blair’s election as putting Britain on wrong track
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A poll is just a friend you haven't met yet?
Tories and Reform broadly similar. Labour, LibDems and Greens broadly similar (but LibDems more anti-Trump and less anti-Thatcher).
https://www.itv.com/news/2025-07-30/australia-to-ban-youtube-accounts-for-under-16s
Starmer or whoever is Labour leader at the next GE will still be aiming to retain their majority and stop Reform taking the redwall marginals Labour won last year, so they are unlikely to push rejoin or even a closer EEA or CU style relationship. Only if Labour lose their majority and the LDs hold the balance of power would a minority Labour government then be pushed to a closer relationship with the EU such as a CU
Or perhaps the Major Sleaze cabinet - began the break in trust between politicians and electorate, culminating in expenses 08 and reinvigorated under partygate.
The 80s race riots
Police vs miners at Orgreave
Poll tax riots
The Hong Kong capitulation
Many of the big issues we face, such as the consequences of privatisation, foreign ownership of many essentially public services, and the financialisation of the housing market, stem back to the Thatcher era; while the reforms of the 1980s dealt with some big problems inherited from the 60s and 70s, such as unions holding the country to ransom, they also sowed the seeds of enduring national weakness. But selecting that as the main reason Britain is on the wrong track ignores the bigger later factors including Brexit. And the Tories selecting Johnson probably had more toxic consequences for our politics in the round, than Brexit per se. If we had done a ‘Norway for now’ compromise, we wouldn’t be in half as much of a mess.
It is why Magic Grandpa's message lands.
“not a single person has taken the offer”
https://x.com/morqon/status/1950246497758429355
Italy because I think that’s where I defaulted it to by accident.
The mistake was called live during the last Brown budget and opposition response by PBers including one very handsome one
No personal connection whatsoever m’lud.
Oh, hold on, no, Brown's biggest mistake was PFI.
Conversely, Academy Schools was a Labour initiative that the Tories ran away with to essentially undermine and eventually abolish LEAs.
The Eden myth is this “fall” retold
The evidence is in the bones. After the move to farming humans became notably shorter. A sure sign of a less healthy life and diet. It is thought that Greeks and Turks only caught up with their previous hunter-gathering average height in the early 20th century
I believe thriller writer Tom Knox explores these themes in his famously non-violent thriller THE GENESIS SECRET
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
Taxes on income went down, indirect ones, in particular VAT, up.
A triumph
Its the high carb grain intensive farming that has made us dull and slow as a species
I’m sitting on a plane on the runway at Gatwick
All of sudden there wasn’t the tax revenues from FS, and the measures introduced to prevent bigger problems (0% rates and QE) primarily benefited existing asset holders (I appreciate that the way they worked prevented bigger harms). But if you’ve worked for ten or so years with little material improvement in circumstances and little economic growth. Or just started off in a harder employment environment with an obscene amount of student debt. And you’ve seen public services salami sliced to virtually nothing. You are bound to hold someone / anyone to blame. So first it was Europe, now it seems it is all immigration’s fault.
Of course the reality is that it wasn’t really any of those things. But absent the magic money tree mob no one is offering a better and more cohesive view of how to get us out what is a pretty rubbish scenario.
But it's interesting that the left have better and more recent focal points (Brexit etc) than the Right, who have to scrabble for Tony Blair.
Although there have been some plucky attempts to pin it all on Starmer, Blair is the only realistic culprit available.
(If you were 16 in 1979, you are in your sixties now, so it's not a crazy Year Dot for the public as a whole.)
Amy Winehouse, Rita Ora, Billie Piper, Dua Lipa and McFly's Tom Fletcher are among the stars who trained at the school early in their careers before going on to mainstream success.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyvn75r578ro
Pure hunter-gatherer societies just didn't stand a chance against warlike States, although nomadic coalitions of steppe horsemen maintained military parity for a long time.
Following a three-week trail at Liverpool Crown Court, Amaaz was convicted of assaulting PC Lydia Ward, causing actual bodily harm, and the assault of emergency worker PC Ellie Cook.
The jury was unable to reach verdicts on allegations that Amaaz and his brother, Muhammad Ahmed, 26, assaulted PC Zachary Marsden causing actual bodily harm.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y9y37eyddo
Scratches head.
https://x.com/electpoliticsuk/status/1950573144596693269?s=61
Now he needs a really draconian sentence or the accusations of two tier justice will only grow. He could have killed one of those coppers
He certainly needs a longer sentence than Lucy Connolly
https://x.com/bbcnews/status/1950434391873704180?s=61
NB. “Seeing like a State” is good on this topic (the transition to agriculture & the formation of the early states, not war...)
Lucy Powell needs to resign or be sacked from the cabinet. And Paul Waugh needs to issue an apology pronto:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1234587107900060
"All planes grounded at London airports
London's airports are facing widespread cancellations and delays
All of London’s airspace has been closed because of a technical failure."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/30/london-airspace-shuts-heathrow-gatwick-failure
I have doubts I’ll be flying today. Feels like one of those major fuck ups
Paul Waugh has tried to subtly walk it back, but as a constituent who voted for him, I am unimpressed and will be writing to him to make my feelings clear.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/opinion/views/we-need-to-be-honest-about-londons-crime-wave/
We are afraid to talk about Black violent crime in the way we do about Grooming gangs which is dominated by Muslims because race is even more sensitive a subject than religion. But needs to change.