Those who like to trade this market at least have some names who will be in the ring.
I don't think Newsom has much support outside California. That said, he is lucky that he gets to be the Democrat that fights with Trump. That's a huge advantage as far as name recognition goes. His problem is that most Americans don't want their country to be more like California. And therefore, he's a poor pick for Presidential nominee.
Buttigieg's problems are two-fold: Firstly, he doesn't really have much of a track record as an elected (or even appointed) politician. Secondly, he's gay. Now, the second could - I believe - be overcome, if that was his sole issue. But together, he's more of a Party Chairman type figure, who can enthuse the faithful.
If this were a normal electoral cycle, those would be fair comments, but it's clearly not.
It might be the case that someone like Beshear will look attractive as the nominee by the time of the primaries. But in the meantime, those leading the opposition to Trump are going to make the running.
I wouldn't like to guess who will be the nominee until much closer to the election. But it might be a good market to trade.
Any Democrat would have won in 2008, even AOC could win if Trump and Vance's approval rating is at just 40% in 2028
Incidentally, I note @rcs1000 that you made comparisons with 20 years ago, but I can't find the comparable data from 20 years ago so I don't know what you're looking at. The survey was changed 12 years ago it seems to expand how it asked about sexual offences. So comparisons with a decade ago seem to be comparing like for like (and surprisingly this shows a significant increase) while comparisons with 20 years ago are not, since the methodology and questioning is significantly different.
If you could share what data from 20 years ago you're looking at, and whether its a like-for-like comparison with modern surveys, I would be curious.
That's actually a really interesting point: rape has come down sharply, from 1.2% of women having reported being raped to 0.4%. On the other hand, sexual assault has increased quite markedly.
So - there's a question about whether people previously counted sexual assault as rape, and now are categorising it correctly. On the other hand, there's the equal issue that people tend to take these things a lot more seriously than they used to.
The definition of rape in Scotland was greatly widened by the 2009 Act to include both oral and anal as well as vaginal rape. I must say I find the findings of the BCS very surprising. When I started at the bar rape was a relatively rare charge, not least because without DNA it was very difficult to prove. Now it is more than 80% of High Court cases.
There is an element of catch up, quite a lot of our cases involve historic offences not reported to the police at the time, but it is hard to reconcile such a drop with such a transformation in prosecution.
Presumably the ‘gap’ in prosecutions during the covid years also means that this and the next few years will be ‘catch up’ - I.e. there will be an apparent surge in the number of prosecutions not because reported/alleged crime has risen but because each court year will be handling more than a year of reported offences?
Not really. We kept going throughout Covid with remote juries watching trials from cinemas. The number of trials was reduced but not by much. 25 years ago the staple of the High Court was drugs and murder. Drugs trials that run are comparatively rare these days, most plead out when the trial diet is reached. Even murder is more often a plea because of the ubiquity of CCTV. I had a murder at the beginning of last week where the whole thing was caught on CCTV and there was nothing more needed so he pled.
There has been a lot of money spent on public awareness and positive encouragement to come forward for rape victims. The attitude of the police and the prosecution service has really changed. I also find from my cases that there are a lot of vulnerable young women wandering about drunk or on drugs who end up being taken advantage of. I repeat I find the drop in the BCS really hard to reconcile with what I see from day to day.
Explanation?
1. Pollsters not asking the right people the right questions. 2. Shy responders 3. Crime within only certain hard to identify communities 4. Something else?
I suspect with rape it could be a difference between a significant proportion of women going to trial now against almost none of them twenty years ago
That's how you can get a vastly higher number of trials while victimisation has dropped - which I do believe: more awareness of bad behaviour and less alcohol.
Though we know that the number of rapes that result in convictions is very low.
Perhaps that's why more go to trial. Perhaps the defendants think they can get away with it.
Today’s Sunday Rawnsley, brought to you from a warm and majestic Stockholm:
The threat to Labour from parties to its left is almost certain to be more potent at the next election. There will be leftwing disillusionment with the Starmer government to exploit, and hoping to do the exploiting will be a new grouping revolving around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana… The new leftwing party will attack Labour as hostile to migrants, antagonistic towards the poor, too close to business and hard to distinguish from the Tories. The new party will be targeting the substantial wedge of leftwing voters who feel let down by Labour.
One fear beginning to stalk Labour’s ranks is that the government finds itself fighting a two-front war, simultaneously besieged by populists to both right and left. Those casting their minds ahead to next May’s local elections see the potential for a new left party to have a substantial impact on contests in urban areas such as the inner-cities of London and Birmingham.
The name-pending party has yet to elect a leader, draw up a constitution or stage a conference. It may ultimately fall apart or fizzle into irrelevance by succumbing to the self-indulgence, factionalism and acrimony that has been the perennial hallmark of the British left. Then again, you can argue that the way things are going means that conditions have rarely been more propitious for this kind of party. If they get their act together, this has the potential to be a highly menacing development for Labour. Sir Keir’s party will need to find an effective way of dealing with it. Dismissive sneering doesn’t amount to a strategy.
Stockholm is a lovely city, perhaps my favourite European capital, but in your photo it is quite hard to judge the scale of the harbour.
It’s my first time - and one of the last European capitals for me still to visit (outside the former USSR I think I only have Sofia and the former Yugoslav ones left, except I have been to Belgrade and Ljubljana). Even though both are sizeable settlements, both Oslo and Helsinki have a compact, small town feel, whereas Stockholm feels like a large city and the centre is full of majestic, imperial and imposing buildings. First impressions very positive (except for the usual Swedish failure on the dog friendly front); today Mr Dog and I are about to go out by boat into the archipelago)
I highly recommend the Vasa museum if you can.
Its an amazingly intact find, as the Baltic preserves wood quite well.
Not sure if you would need to find a dog-sitter.
Isn't the Vasa the one that was so top heavy with guns that it sank on launch? Should have been named Hubris.
My new mega millionaire friend just sent me this tweet - not by him - to illustrate his thesis that Britain is fiscally fucked and a crash is coming soon
“The UK spent £16.4bn in debt interest (not repayment) in June
That’s £438.50 for each taxpayer- for one month. £5,260 per taxpayer per year
The UK avg salary is £37,000. On that they’ll pay £4,884 of income tax
It's not as bad as that, the £16.4bn figure was high for a single month, the year will probably come in at £120bn in debt interest. If you'd been reading on the day plenty of us pointed out how unsustainable this is and that the government seems intent on increasing spend not cutting it which will make everything worse.
The Tories have to start telling the unpopular truth that the UK is no longer a rich country, we're a middle income country pretending to be rich and we need to start living in that reality if we're ever going to become a rich nation again.
Kemi has said she will slash spending as Milei has. Reform will cut civil servants and local government. Labour will raise tax of course yet further including capital gains tax
A real terms cut of 30% plus in pensions, for example ? That would need a bit more than getting rid of the triple lock.
An axe to welfare spending certainly which Labour have ducked.
Reform would axe EDI and net zero initiatives and overseas aid
Today’s Sunday Rawnsley, brought to you from a warm and majestic Stockholm:
The threat to Labour from parties to its left is almost certain to be more potent at the next election. There will be leftwing disillusionment with the Starmer government to exploit, and hoping to do the exploiting will be a new grouping revolving around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana… The new leftwing party will attack Labour as hostile to migrants, antagonistic towards the poor, too close to business and hard to distinguish from the Tories. The new party will be targeting the substantial wedge of leftwing voters who feel let down by Labour.
One fear beginning to stalk Labour’s ranks is that the government finds itself fighting a two-front war, simultaneously besieged by populists to both right and left. Those casting their minds ahead to next May’s local elections see the potential for a new left party to have a substantial impact on contests in urban areas such as the inner-cities of London and Birmingham.
The name-pending party has yet to elect a leader, draw up a constitution or stage a conference. It may ultimately fall apart or fizzle into irrelevance by succumbing to the self-indulgence, factionalism and acrimony that has been the perennial hallmark of the British left. Then again, you can argue that the way things are going means that conditions have rarely been more propitious for this kind of party. If they get their act together, this has the potential to be a highly menacing development for Labour. Sir Keir’s party will need to find an effective way of dealing with it. Dismissive sneering doesn’t amount to a strategy.
Stockholm is a lovely city, perhaps my favourite European capital, but in your photo it is quite hard to judge the scale of the harbour.
It’s my first time - and one of the last European capitals for me still to visit (outside the former USSR I think I only have Sofia and the former Yugoslav ones left, except I have been to Belgrade and Ljubljana). Even though both are sizeable settlements, both Oslo and Helsinki have a compact, small town feel, whereas Stockholm feels like a large city and the centre is full of majestic, imperial and imposing buildings. First impressions very positive (except for the usual Swedish failure on the dog friendly front); today Mr Dog and I are about to go out by boat into the archipelago)
I highly recommend the Vasa museum if you can.
Its an amazingly intact find, as the Baltic preserves wood quite well.
Not sure if you would need to find a dog-sitter.
Isn't the Vasa the one that was so top heavy with guns that it sank on launch? Should have been named Hubris.
Yes, they should have learnt lessons from the Mary Rose a century before.
My new mega millionaire friend just sent me this tweet - not by him - to illustrate his thesis that Britain is fiscally fucked and a crash is coming soon
“The UK spent £16.4bn in debt interest (not repayment) in June
That’s £438.50 for each taxpayer- for one month. £5,260 per taxpayer per year
The UK avg salary is £37,000. On that they’ll pay £4,884 of income tax
It's not as bad as that, the £16.4bn figure was high for a single month, the year will probably come in at £120bn in debt interest. If you'd been reading on the day plenty of us pointed out how unsustainable this is and that the government seems intent on increasing spend not cutting it which will make everything worse.
The Tories have to start telling the unpopular truth that the UK is no longer a rich country, we're a middle income country pretending to be rich and we need to start living in that reality if we're ever going to become a rich nation again.
Kemi has said she will slash spending as Milei has. Reform will cut civil servants and local government. Labour will raise tax of course yet further including capital gains tax
A real terms cut of 30% plus in pensions, for example ? That would need a bit more than getting rid of the triple lock.
An axe to welfare spending certainly which Labour have ducked.
Reform would axe EDI and net zero initiatives and overseas aid
Overseas aid has already been gutted to pay for both asylum seekers in the UK and defence.
Anyone looking there for savings can't do their sums or is simply lying to the mob.
We have been warned. Reform will be mini-me Trump 2.0 for the UK. DOGE, corrupting the civil service to rig the figures, crony business mates in the Cabinet etc etc.
How is the country to be administered if the "majority" of civil servants are fired?
Zia Yusuf
@ZiaYusufUK · 3h Enough talk of hiring in the civil service. The majority will be fired.
Reform cannot be a mini me Trump 2.0 because the civil service is very different to that of the US. In the US the new president appoints their own whereas here they continue to serve even if there is a change of party.
And REFORM will not be able to fire any one who disagrees with them as that will bring masses of employment tribunals.
The blob cannot be so easily defeated in Britain.
Then there's the matter of the House of Lords, and REFORM won't have anywhere near a majority there, whereas the GOP controls Congress as well as the presidency and more or less the political SCOTUS.
REFORM will have many more checks and balances.
... which is ironic given how much Americans drivel on about the checks and balances in their crappy constitution.
Trump has essentially used patronage to override them. Our HoL is largely immune, having jobs for life, but on their own they can’t do that much. We should be wary in thinking that some sort of magical cultural inhibition unique to these isles would stop the civil service being perverted in the same way as has happened in the US. History is full of examples as to how quickly democratic institutions can be undermined, and the safest defence is always not to support or pander to extremist politicians in the first place.
Yes, a Reform government that fires most of the Civil Service* is also going to have a substantial number of ministers that are not MPs.
So they see the future as an all powerful PM who promotes his cronies, purges his enemies and acts without restraint from Parliament, Civil Service or the Law. It sounds to me at least as destructive as Trump in terms of constitutionality.
*does he really mean this? Most Civil Servants are doing mundane things like collating government statistics, making payments of pensions etc.
Perhaps he just has a very narrow definition of 'civil servant' as 'executive people at the top of major government departments.'
To be fair there are quite a few people in those roles whom we wouldn't miss if they went. Susan Acland-Hood, who makes Humza Yusuf look like Sir John Anderson, springs to mind.
Or perhaps he just has the classic 'cut bureaucracy' mentality so beloved of not over-bright opposition politicians who think the key to getting rid of paperwork is to get rid of the people doing it, without realising that it's actually the other way around.
He’s saying he won’t put the people who will actually be running the country up for election, or tell us who they are in advance, but pick them himself afterwards. And, absent any political base of their own, such people will be entirely subject to his whim and hence compliant. That’s halfway to Trumpism already.
I'm not sure how different that is. Cabinet ministers are elected by a small subset of the population - about 1/650th - to serve as the legislator for that district. And then appointed through patronage. They are not in any meaningful way elected nationally to run national Government departments.
The alternative argument to make is that by trying to gain favour to be appointed as cabinet ministers, MPs are prevented from effectively holding the government to account, which is actually one of their jobs.
Today’s Sunday Rawnsley, brought to you from a warm and majestic Stockholm:
The threat to Labour from parties to its left is almost certain to be more potent at the next election. There will be leftwing disillusionment with the Starmer government to exploit, and hoping to do the exploiting will be a new grouping revolving around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana… The new leftwing party will attack Labour as hostile to migrants, antagonistic towards the poor, too close to business and hard to distinguish from the Tories. The new party will be targeting the substantial wedge of leftwing voters who feel let down by Labour.
One fear beginning to stalk Labour’s ranks is that the government finds itself fighting a two-front war, simultaneously besieged by populists to both right and left. Those casting their minds ahead to next May’s local elections see the potential for a new left party to have a substantial impact on contests in urban areas such as the inner-cities of London and Birmingham.
The name-pending party has yet to elect a leader, draw up a constitution or stage a conference. It may ultimately fall apart or fizzle into irrelevance by succumbing to the self-indulgence, factionalism and acrimony that has been the perennial hallmark of the British left. Then again, you can argue that the way things are going means that conditions have rarely been more propitious for this kind of party. If they get their act together, this has the potential to be a highly menacing development for Labour. Sir Keir’s party will need to find an effective way of dealing with it. Dismissive sneering doesn’t amount to a strategy.
Stockholm is a lovely city, perhaps my favourite European capital, but in your photo it is quite hard to judge the scale of the harbour.
It’s my first time - and one of the last European capitals for me still to visit (outside the former USSR I think I only have Sofia and the former Yugoslav ones left, except I have been to Belgrade and Ljubljana). Even though both are sizeable settlements, both Oslo and Helsinki have a compact, small town feel, whereas Stockholm feels like a large city and the centre is full of majestic, imperial and imposing buildings. First impressions very positive (except for the usual Swedish failure on the dog friendly front); today Mr Dog and I are about to go out by boat into the archipelago)
I highly recommend the Vasa museum if you can.
Its an amazingly intact find, as the Baltic preserves wood quite well.
Not sure if you would need to find a dog-sitter.
Also Skansen, the open-air museum. And the National Museum for the Viking and Vendel era stuff.
Woke people will still be asking, "yeah, but, what does 'Woke' mean?" when it lies totally dead and prostrate on the floor with more knives in its back than Julius Caesar.
I really don't understand what you mean by this. I am Woke.* so how does this work? Am I to be killed, or just sent to a re-education camp until I am brainwashed into singing the RefCon party line?
* Woke means to me "aware of the systemic injustices in society, particularly but not exclusively relating to ethnicity, gender, religion and social class"
That's what you want it to mean, because it appeals to your vanity.
Gay used to mean happy, too
So what does killing it mean?
Exterminating people like me or political re-education in Cultural Revolution style?
For me, it means excluding people like you from any meaningful role in western politics for at least a decade. The method to be determined
That’s the only way to rinse Woke out of the system
Ah, so like with the Nazis after WW2 in Germany?
And - if you think about it - gassing Jews and using peoples' preferred pronouns are actually very similar.
That's a bit provocative.
But it's fair to ask what are the boundaries of Leon's "method to be determined", and what he means by "excluding from any meaningful role for at least a decade".
It's the usual "how close can I get to the line of unacceptability before the mods step in?" game.
Today’s Sunday Rawnsley, brought to you from a warm and majestic Stockholm:
The threat to Labour from parties to its left is almost certain to be more potent at the next election. There will be leftwing disillusionment with the Starmer government to exploit, and hoping to do the exploiting will be a new grouping revolving around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana… The new leftwing party will attack Labour as hostile to migrants, antagonistic towards the poor, too close to business and hard to distinguish from the Tories. The new party will be targeting the substantial wedge of leftwing voters who feel let down by Labour.
One fear beginning to stalk Labour’s ranks is that the government finds itself fighting a two-front war, simultaneously besieged by populists to both right and left. Those casting their minds ahead to next May’s local elections see the potential for a new left party to have a substantial impact on contests in urban areas such as the inner-cities of London and Birmingham.
The name-pending party has yet to elect a leader, draw up a constitution or stage a conference. It may ultimately fall apart or fizzle into irrelevance by succumbing to the self-indulgence, factionalism and acrimony that has been the perennial hallmark of the British left. Then again, you can argue that the way things are going means that conditions have rarely been more propitious for this kind of party. If they get their act together, this has the potential to be a highly menacing development for Labour. Sir Keir’s party will need to find an effective way of dealing with it. Dismissive sneering doesn’t amount to a strategy.
Stockholm is a lovely city, perhaps my favourite European capital, but in your photo it is quite hard to judge the scale of the harbour.
If only there was an element that could be added to provide visual context for that scale.
Sadly my mobile measuring device is barred from hotel's spectacular rooftop bar and terrace
Those who like to trade this market at least have some names who will be in the ring.
I don't think Newsom has much support outside California. That said, he is lucky that he gets to be the Democrat that fights with Trump. That's a huge advantage as far as name recognition goes. His problem is that most Americans don't want their country to be more like California. And therefore, he's a poor pick for Presidential nominee.
Buttigieg's problems are two-fold: Firstly, he doesn't really have much of a track record as an elected (or even appointed) politician. Secondly, he's gay. Now, the second could - I believe - be overcome, if that was his sole issue. But together, he's more of a Party Chairman type figure, who can enthuse the faithful.
If this were a normal electoral cycle, those would be fair comments, but it's clearly not.
It might be the case that someone like Beshear will look attractive as the nominee by the time of the primaries. But in the meantime, those leading the opposition to Trump are going to make the running.
I wouldn't like to guess who will be the nominee until much closer to the election. But it might be a good market to trade.
Any Democrat would have won in 2008, even AOC could win if Trump and Vance's approval rating is at just 40% in 2028
Incidentally, I note @rcs1000 that you made comparisons with 20 years ago, but I can't find the comparable data from 20 years ago so I don't know what you're looking at. The survey was changed 12 years ago it seems to expand how it asked about sexual offences. So comparisons with a decade ago seem to be comparing like for like (and surprisingly this shows a significant increase) while comparisons with 20 years ago are not, since the methodology and questioning is significantly different.
If you could share what data from 20 years ago you're looking at, and whether its a like-for-like comparison with modern surveys, I would be curious.
That's actually a really interesting point: rape has come down sharply, from 1.2% of women having reported being raped to 0.4%. On the other hand, sexual assault has increased quite markedly.
So - there's a question about whether people previously counted sexual assault as rape, and now are categorising it correctly. On the other hand, there's the equal issue that people tend to take these things a lot more seriously than they used to.
The definition of rape in Scotland was greatly widened by the 2009 Act to include both oral and anal as well as vaginal rape. I must say I find the findings of the BCS very surprising. When I started at the bar rape was a relatively rare charge, not least because without DNA it was very difficult to prove. Now it is more than 80% of High Court cases.
There is an element of catch up, quite a lot of our cases involve historic offences not reported to the police at the time, but it is hard to reconcile such a drop with such a transformation in prosecution.
Presumably the ‘gap’ in prosecutions during the covid years also means that this and the next few years will be ‘catch up’ - I.e. there will be an apparent surge in the number of prosecutions not because reported/alleged crime has risen but because each court year will be handling more than a year of reported offences?
Not really. We kept going throughout Covid with remote juries watching trials from cinemas. The number of trials was reduced but not by much. 25 years ago the staple of the High Court was drugs and murder. Drugs trials that run are comparatively rare these days, most plead out when the trial diet is reached. Even murder is more often a plea because of the ubiquity of CCTV. I had a murder at the beginning of last week where the whole thing was caught on CCTV and there was nothing more needed so he pled.
There has been a lot of money spent on public awareness and positive encouragement to come forward for rape victims. The attitude of the police and the prosecution service has really changed. I also find from my cases that there are a lot of vulnerable young women wandering about drunk or on drugs who end up being taken advantage of. I repeat I find the drop in the BCS really hard to reconcile with what I see from day to day.
Incidentally, I note @rcs1000 that you made comparisons with 20 years ago, but I can't find the comparable data from 20 years ago so I don't know what you're looking at. The survey was changed 12 years ago it seems to expand how it asked about sexual offences. So comparisons with a decade ago seem to be comparing like for like (and surprisingly this shows a significant increase) while comparisons with 20 years ago are not, since the methodology and questioning is significantly different.
If you could share what data from 20 years ago you're looking at, and whether its a like-for-like comparison with modern surveys, I would be curious.
That's actually a really interesting point: rape has come down sharply, from 1.2% of women having reported being raped to 0.4%. On the other hand, sexual assault has increased quite markedly.
So - there's a question about whether people previously counted sexual assault as rape, and now are categorising it correctly. On the other hand, there's the equal issue that people tend to take these things a lot more seriously than they used to.
The definition of rape in Scotland was greatly widened by the 2009 Act to include both oral and anal as well as vaginal rape. I must say I find the findings of the BCS very surprising. When I started at the bar rape was a relatively rare charge, not least because without DNA it was very difficult to prove. Now it is more than 80% of High Court cases.
There is an element of catch up, quite a lot of our cases involve historic offences not reported to the police at the time, but it is hard to reconcile such a drop with such a transformation in prosecution.
Presumably the ‘gap’ in prosecutions during the covid years also means that this and the next few years will be ‘catch up’ - I.e. there will be an apparent surge in the number of prosecutions not because reported/alleged crime has risen but because each court year will be handling more than a year of reported offences?
Not really. We kept going throughout Covid with remote juries watching trials from cinemas. The number of trials was reduced but not by much. 25 years ago the staple of the High Court was drugs and murder. Drugs trials that run are comparatively rare these days, most plead out when the trial diet is reached. Even murder is more often a plea because of the ubiquity of CCTV. I had a murder at the beginning of last week where the whole thing was caught on CCTV and there was nothing more needed so he pled.
There has been a lot of money spent on public awareness and positive encouragement to come forward for rape victims. The attitude of the police and the prosecution service has really changed. I also find from my cases that there are a lot of vulnerable young women wandering about drunk or on drugs who end up being taken advantage of. I repeat I find the drop in the BCS really hard to reconcile with what I see from day to day.
Explanation?
1. Pollsters not asking the right people the right questions. 2. Shy responders 3. Crime within only certain hard to identify communities 4. Something else?
I honestly don't know.
Undoubtedly a far higher proportion of rapes are being prosecuted than was the case in the past. It may be that the percentage has gone up even more than we realised so that the reduction in the overall rate of offending has been disguised. Personally, and anecdotally, however, I think that there is more to it. Previous generations were much more open to blaming themselves, victim blaming. Younger people, entirely correctly, might acknowledge that getting that drunk or being persuaded to go to that hotel room was stupid but it does not excuse, explain or justify what happened. That would seem likely to me, all other things being equal, to increase the number of women who thought that they had been raped. And yet we have the drop. Its strange.
We have been warned. Reform will be mini-me Trump 2.0 for the UK. DOGE, corrupting the civil service to rig the figures, crony business mates in the Cabinet etc etc.
How is the country to be administered if the "majority" of civil servants are fired?
Zia Yusuf
@ZiaYusufUK · 3h Enough talk of hiring in the civil service. The majority will be fired.
Reform cannot be a mini me Trump 2.0 because the civil service is very different to that of the US. In the US the new president appoints their own whereas here they continue to serve even if there is a change of party.
And REFORM will not be able to fire any one who disagrees with them as that will bring masses of employment tribunals.
The blob cannot be so easily defeated in Britain.
Then there's the matter of the House of Lords, and REFORM won't have anywhere near a majority there, whereas the GOP controls Congress as well as the presidency and more or less the political SCOTUS.
REFORM will have many more checks and balances.
... which is ironic given how much Americans drivel on about the checks and balances in their crappy constitution.
Trump has essentially used patronage to override them. Our HoL is largely immune, having jobs for life, but on their own they can’t do that much. We should be wary in thinking that some sort of magical cultural inhibition unique to these isles would stop the civil service being perverted in the same way as has happened in the US. History is full of examples as to how quickly democratic institutions can be undermined, and the safest defence is always not to support or pander to extremist politicians in the first place.
Yes, a Reform government that fires most of the Civil Service* is also going to have a substantial number of ministers that are not MPs.
So they see the future as an all powerful PM who promotes his cronies, purges his enemies and acts without restraint from Parliament, Civil Service or the Law. It sounds to me at least as destructive as Trump in terms of constitutionality.
*does he really mean this? Most Civil Servants are doing mundane things like collating government statistics, making payments of pensions etc.
Perhaps he just has a very narrow definition of 'civil servant' as 'executive people at the top of major government departments.'
To be fair there are quite a few people in those roles whom we wouldn't miss if they went. Susan Acland-Hood, who makes Humza Yusuf look like Sir John Anderson, springs to mind.
Or perhaps he just has the classic 'cut bureaucracy' mentality so beloved of not over-bright opposition politicians who think the key to getting rid of paperwork is to get rid of the people doing it, without realising that it's actually the other way around.
He’s saying he won’t put the people who will actually be running the country up for election, or tell us who they are in advance, but pick them himself afterwards. And, absent any political base of their own, such people will be entirely subject to his whim and hence compliant. That’s halfway to Trumpism already.
I'm not sure how different that is. Cabinet ministers are elected by a small subset of the population - about 1/650th - to serve as the legislator for that district. And then appointed through patronage. They are not in any meaningful way elected nationally to run national Government departments.
The alternative argument to make is that by trying to gain favour to be appointed as cabinet ministers, MPs are prevented from effectively holding the government to account, which is actually one of their jobs.
We have a parliamentary not executive presidential system though and Cabinet Ministers need to answer questions in Parliament and not just to committees
Woke people will still be asking, "yeah, but, what does 'Woke' mean?" when it lies totally dead and prostrate on the floor with more knives in its back than Julius Caesar.
I really don't understand what you mean by this. I am Woke.* so how does this work? Am I to be killed, or just sent to a re-education camp until I am brainwashed into singing the RefCon party line?
* Woke means to me "aware of the systemic injustices in society, particularly but not exclusively relating to ethnicity, gender, religion and social class"
That's what you want it to mean, because it appeals to your vanity.
Gay used to mean happy, too
So what does killing it mean?
Exterminating people like me or political re-education in Cultural Revolution style?
Wow,
Someone describing themselves as "woke",, one of the breed responsible for millions of pointless hours in DEI courses at work, systemically rigging school lessons to promote woke narratives and undermining great institutions like the National Trust, accusing OTHER PEOPLE of promoting political re-education? That's not even going into the origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, supported by far too many of the Western left.
I think my Irony Meter just exploded.
And I'd just got a new one after I heard Putin calling Zelensky a dictator a few months back...
We have been warned. Reform will be mini-me Trump 2.0 for the UK. DOGE, corrupting the civil service to rig the figures, crony business mates in the Cabinet etc etc.
How is the country to be administered if the "majority" of civil servants are fired?
Zia Yusuf
@ZiaYusufUK · 3h Enough talk of hiring in the civil service. The majority will be fired.
Reform cannot be a mini me Trump 2.0 because the civil service is very different to that of the US. In the US the new president appoints their own whereas here they continue to serve even if there is a change of party.
And REFORM will not be able to fire any one who disagrees with them as that will bring masses of employment tribunals.
The blob cannot be so easily defeated in Britain.
Then there's the matter of the House of Lords, and REFORM won't have anywhere near a majority there, whereas the GOP controls Congress as well as the presidency and more or less the political SCOTUS.
REFORM will have many more checks and balances.
... which is ironic given how much Americans drivel on about the checks and balances in their crappy constitution.
Trump has essentially used patronage to override them. Our HoL is largely immune, having jobs for life, but on their own they can’t do that much. We should be wary in thinking that some sort of magical cultural inhibition unique to these isles would stop the civil service being perverted in the same way as has happened in the US. History is full of examples as to how quickly democratic institutions can be undermined, and the safest defence is always not to support or pander to extremist politicians in the first place.
Yes, a Reform government that fires most of the Civil Service* is also going to have a substantial number of ministers that are not MPs.
So they see the future as an all powerful PM who promotes his cronies, purges his enemies and acts without restraint from Parliament, Civil Service or the Law. It sounds to me at least as destructive as Trump in terms of constitutionality.
*does he really mean this? Most Civil Servants are doing mundane things like collating government statistics, making payments of pensions etc.
Perhaps he just has a very narrow definition of 'civil servant' as 'executive people at the top of major government departments.'
To be fair there are quite a few people in those roles whom we wouldn't miss if they went. Susan Acland-Hood, who makes Humza Yusuf look like Sir John Anderson, springs to mind.
Or perhaps he just has the classic 'cut bureaucracy' mentality so beloved of not over-bright opposition politicians who think the key to getting rid of paperwork is to get rid of the people doing it, without realising that it's actually the other way around.
He’s saying he won’t put the people who will actually be running the country up for election, or tell us who they are in advance, but pick them himself afterwards. And, absent any political base of their own, such people will be entirely subject to his whim and hence compliant. That’s halfway to Trumpism already.
I'm not sure how different that is. Cabinet ministers are elected by a small subset of the population - about 1/650th - to serve as the legislator for that district. And then appointed through patronage. They are not in any meaningful way elected nationally to run national Government departments.
The alternative argument to make is that by trying to gain favour to be appointed as cabinet ministers, MPs are prevented from effectively holding the government to account, which is actually one of their jobs.
We have a parliamentary not executive presidential system though and Cabinet Ministers need to answer questions in Parliament and not just to committees
The House of Commons could sit as a Committee of the Whole House. Or could call Cabinet Ministers to the Bar of the House to answer questions. Or simply amend its Standing Orders to allow Cabinet Ministers to attend to answer questions.
Alternively, the Government could simply appoint MPs to be departmental spokespeople, which is effectively what happens in the House that the Secretary of State isn't a member of.
Yes, it was compulsory when I was at High School in Atlanta. It took about a week, involving directly supervised by the PE coaches, push ups, sit ups pull ups, and I think both a sprint and a longer run. Each was timeed and scored against age targets that were higher each year. As I recall, only about 10% would get the fitness award, and I never got close.
Its not a bad idea, particularly with the rise in obesity to get an idea of fitness. It was mostly loathed by students apart from the jocks. The coaches acted like drill instructors, and I think it came in in the 1950s as a way of measuring fitness for military service.
Incidentally, I note @rcs1000 that you made comparisons with 20 years ago, but I can't find the comparable data from 20 years ago so I don't know what you're looking at. The survey was changed 12 years ago it seems to expand how it asked about sexual offences. So comparisons with a decade ago seem to be comparing like for like (and surprisingly this shows a significant increase) while comparisons with 20 years ago are not, since the methodology and questioning is significantly different.
If you could share what data from 20 years ago you're looking at, and whether its a like-for-like comparison with modern surveys, I would be curious.
That's actually a really interesting point: rape has come down sharply, from 1.2% of women having reported being raped to 0.4%. On the other hand, sexual assault has increased quite markedly.
So - there's a question about whether people previously counted sexual assault as rape, and now are categorising it correctly. On the other hand, there's the equal issue that people tend to take these things a lot more seriously than they used to.
The definition of rape in Scotland was greatly widened by the 2009 Act to include both oral and anal as well as vaginal rape. I must say I find the findings of the BCS very surprising. When I started at the bar rape was a relatively rare charge, not least because without DNA it was very difficult to prove. Now it is more than 80% of High Court cases.
There is an element of catch up, quite a lot of our cases involve historic offences not reported to the police at the time, but it is hard to reconcile such a drop with such a transformation in prosecution.
Presumably the ‘gap’ in prosecutions during the covid years also means that this and the next few years will be ‘catch up’ - I.e. there will be an apparent surge in the number of prosecutions not because reported/alleged crime has risen but because each court year will be handling more than a year of reported offences?
Not really. We kept going throughout Covid with remote juries watching trials from cinemas. The number of trials was reduced but not by much. 25 years ago the staple of the High Court was drugs and murder. Drugs trials that run are comparatively rare these days, most plead out when the trial diet is reached. Even murder is more often a plea because of the ubiquity of CCTV. I had a murder at the beginning of last week where the whole thing was caught on CCTV and there was nothing more needed so he pled.
There has been a lot of money spent on public awareness and positive encouragement to come forward for rape victims. The attitude of the police and the prosecution service has really changed. I also find from my cases that there are a lot of vulnerable young women wandering about drunk or on drugs who end up being taken advantage of. I repeat I find the drop in the BCS really hard to reconcile with what I see from day to day.
“A second man, Mohammad Kabir, also 23, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, as well as strangulation and kidnap of the girl, who is now receiving specialist care.
Despite the huge interest the incident has caused in Nuneaton, sources have told the Mail on Sunday that Warwickshire Police advised local councillors and officials not to reveal the asylum seeker background of the two suspects, for fear of 'inflaming community tensions”
STRANGULATION
How stupid are these people, covering things up a) doesn't work into today's connected world (everybody is in WhatsApp groups) and b) trying to cover up things just makes it worse and allows falsehoods to spread....did they learn nothing from the incident of the Welsh choir boy.
Woke people will still be asking, "yeah, but, what does 'Woke' mean?" when it lies totally dead and prostrate on the floor with more knives in its back than Julius Caesar.
I really don't understand what you mean by this. I am Woke.* so how does this work? Am I to be killed, or just sent to a re-education camp until I am brainwashed into singing the RefCon party line?
* Woke means to me "aware of the systemic injustices in society, particularly but not exclusively relating to ethnicity, gender, religion and social class"
That's what you want it to mean, because it appeals to your vanity.
Gay used to mean happy, too
So what does killing it mean?
Exterminating people like me or political re-education in Cultural Revolution style?
Wow,
Someone describing themselves as "woke",, one of the breed responsible for millions of pointless hours in DEI courses at work, systemically rigging school lessons to promote woke narratives and undermining great institutions like the National Trust, accusing OTHER PEOPLE of promoting political re-education? That's not even going into the origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, supported by far too many of the Western left.
I think my Irony Meter just exploded.
And I'd just got a new one after I heard Putin calling Zelensky a dictator a few months back...
I have done none of those things, so am I note Woke, even if I identify as so?
Woke people will still be asking, "yeah, but, what does 'Woke' mean?" when it lies totally dead and prostrate on the floor with more knives in its back than Julius Caesar.
I really don't understand what you mean by this. I am Woke.* so how does this work? Am I to be killed, or just sent to a re-education camp until I am brainwashed into singing the RefCon party line?
* Woke means to me "aware of the systemic injustices in society, particularly but not exclusively relating to ethnicity, gender, religion and social class"
That's what you want it to mean, because it appeals to your vanity.
Gay used to mean happy, too
So what does killing it mean?
Exterminating people like me or political re-education in Cultural Revolution style?
Wow,
Someone describing themselves as "woke",, one of the breed responsible for millions of pointless hours in DEI courses at work, systemically rigging school lessons to promote woke narratives and undermining great institutions like the National Trust, accusing OTHER PEOPLE of promoting political re-education? That's not even going into the origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, supported by far too many of the Western left.
I think my Irony Meter just exploded.
And I'd just got a new one after I heard Putin calling Zelensky a dictator a few months back...
Actually it was Trump who called Zelensky a "dictator".
“A second man, Mohammad Kabir, also 23, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, as well as strangulation and kidnap of the girl, who is now receiving specialist care.
Despite the huge interest the incident has caused in Nuneaton, sources have told the Mail on Sunday that Warwickshire Police advised local councillors and officials not to reveal the asylum seeker background of the two suspects, for fear of 'inflaming community tensions”
STRANGULATION
How stupid are these people, covering things up a) doesn't work into today's connected world (everybody is in WhatsApp groups) and b) trying to cover up things just makes it worse and allows falsehoods to spread....did they learn nothing from the incident of the Welsh choir boy.
“A second man, Mohammad Kabir, also 23, has been charged with aiding and abetting rape, as well as strangulation and kidnap of the girl, who is now receiving specialist care.
Despite the huge interest the incident has caused in Nuneaton, sources have told the Mail on Sunday that Warwickshire Police advised local councillors and officials not to reveal the asylum seeker background of the two suspects, for fear of 'inflaming community tensions”
STRANGULATION
How stupid are these people, covering things up a) doesn't work into today's connected world (everybody is in WhatsApp groups) and b) trying to cover up things just makes it worse and allows falsehoods to spread....did they learn nothing from the incident of the Welsh choir boy.
And if a riot had kicked off in Nuneaton you'd have been the first in line to criticise the police, heads you win, tails they lose.
(And, by the way, some crime clearly has risen. There's clearly massively more shoplifting and identity theft than there was. But the proportion of women reporting having been raped in the British Crime Survey is down about 75% from what it was twenty years ago.)
Cyclefree made the point that the problem is not the rape, but rather the people doing the raping. Those who are noisiest about it often have no history of concern about sexual assault, and those that took part in the riots often had a long criminal record of domestic abuse and so on. But even if sexual assault has fallen significantly, and continues to do so, this particular type of incident is likely to be increasing, even if simply as a function of having more people from these countries here than we did before.
This latest - alleged - incident fits this narrative and is almost perfectly designed to undermine social cohesion in the UK. The Daily Mail are reporting that the accused came across on a small boat, it's a twelve year old, the additional details are horrifying, and it's a classic UK town like Nuneaton. I don't want to go full tin hat, but if I were the Russians and wanted to disrupt UK democracy and institutions, this this is the sort of thing they would be arranging.
It's now a national security issue and I think the government should start to treat it as such. I don't think we'll have mass rioting or whatever just because British people are just too nice, but there is a risk a lone individual does something horrific in response.
I'm surprised that all those organisations breaking sub judice rules because they want to generate a febrile summer, and possibly a summer of riots, have forgotten the Christopher Jefferies case.
As of this morning, I still do not know whether Lee Anderson's undocumented anywhere else "Ashfield suspect is an asylum seeker" claim which he used to stoke last week's demo is true, or whether it just more self-interested shit-stirring from Anderson.
Today’s Sunday Rawnsley, brought to you from a warm and majestic Stockholm:
The threat to Labour from parties to its left is almost certain to be more potent at the next election. There will be leftwing disillusionment with the Starmer government to exploit, and hoping to do the exploiting will be a new grouping revolving around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana… The new leftwing party will attack Labour as hostile to migrants, antagonistic towards the poor, too close to business and hard to distinguish from the Tories. The new party will be targeting the substantial wedge of leftwing voters who feel let down by Labour.
One fear beginning to stalk Labour’s ranks is that the government finds itself fighting a two-front war, simultaneously besieged by populists to both right and left. Those casting their minds ahead to next May’s local elections see the potential for a new left party to have a substantial impact on contests in urban areas such as the inner-cities of London and Birmingham.
The name-pending party has yet to elect a leader, draw up a constitution or stage a conference. It may ultimately fall apart or fizzle into irrelevance by succumbing to the self-indulgence, factionalism and acrimony that has been the perennial hallmark of the British left. Then again, you can argue that the way things are going means that conditions have rarely been more propitious for this kind of party. If they get their act together, this has the potential to be a highly menacing development for Labour. Sir Keir’s party will need to find an effective way of dealing with it. Dismissive sneering doesn’t amount to a strategy.
Stockholm is a lovely city, perhaps my favourite European capital, but in your photo it is quite hard to judge the scale of the harbour.
Comments
Perhaps that's why more go to trial. Perhaps the defendants think they can get away with it.
Reform would axe EDI and net zero initiatives and overseas aid
It is amazingly well preserved.
Anyone looking there for savings can't do their sums or is simply lying to the mob.
The alternative argument to make is that by trying to gain favour to be appointed as cabinet ministers, MPs are prevented from effectively holding the government to account, which is actually one of their jobs.
"Trump brings back Presidential Fitness Test for public schools - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/ce3j23zk2w2o
Undoubtedly a far higher proportion of rapes are being prosecuted than was the case in the past. It may be that the percentage has gone up even more than we realised so that the reduction in the overall rate of offending has been disguised. Personally, and anecdotally, however, I think that there is more to it. Previous generations were much more open to blaming themselves, victim blaming. Younger people, entirely correctly, might acknowledge that getting that drunk or being persuaded to go to that hotel room was stupid but it does not excuse, explain or justify what happened. That would seem likely to me, all other things being equal, to increase the number of women who thought that they had been raped. And yet we have the drop. Its strange.
Someone describing themselves as "woke",, one of the breed responsible for millions of pointless hours in DEI courses at work, systemically rigging school lessons to promote woke narratives and undermining great institutions like the National Trust, accusing OTHER PEOPLE of promoting political re-education? That's not even going into the origins of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, supported by far too many of the Western left.
I think my Irony Meter just exploded.
And I'd just got a new one after I heard Putin calling Zelensky a dictator a few months back...
Alternively, the Government could simply appoint MPs to be departmental spokespeople, which is effectively what happens in the House that the Secretary of State isn't a member of.
Its not a bad idea, particularly with the rise in obesity to get an idea of fitness. It was mostly loathed by students apart from the jocks. The coaches acted like drill instructors, and I think it came in in the 1950s as a way of measuring fitness for military service.
NEW THREAD
As of this morning, I still do not know whether Lee Anderson's undocumented anywhere else "Ashfield suspect is an asylum seeker" claim which he used to stoke last week's demo is true, or whether it just more self-interested shit-stirring from Anderson.