In recent weeks, stung by criticism that she was aloof from her MPs, Badenoch has begun inviting in small groups for lunch. Well, platters of shop-bought sandwiches.
When I pointed out to one invitee that Badenoch famously declared last year that she hated sandwiches (in line with just 1% of the British public), they replied "oh no, the MPs had sandwiches, Kemi had something hot brought in".
Reminds me of the time a guy who was going to America had a first class seat, but after booking he started a relationship, and took his new girlfriend on the trip but booked her in standard class on the same flight.
Astonishingly the relationship didn't last long after that trip to America.
Wasn’t there a story about Heath after a long evening with his team having a tasty late supper served to him but nothing for them? Unlikely as it seems perhaps Heath is the closest comparator to Kemi; prickly, humourless, bad at the talking human stuff. Ted of course did nevertheless manage to win elections..
Yah.
Keir Starmer may be lacking in man-management skills, but he’s not the worst PM in that department. The clear winner is Ted Heath, who was sulky to his enemies and inconsiderate to his allies. The former Tory chairman Chris Patten wrote speeches for Heath and tells the Rosebud podcast that he was once summoned on a Saturday morning to Heath’s hotel suite and made to wait for 90 minutes before a kimono-wearing leader let him in, without the offer of a cup of coffee.
Heath’s housekeeper brought in a tray of Chablis, lobster and cheese. “Our eyes were out on stilts because we were absolutely starving,” Patten says. Heath suddenly asked the team if they’d had anything to eat and, when they said no, replied “Oh, you must be very hungry”. He then returned to his meal without a second thought. Patten found this particularly ironic as Heath was asking them to write about “care and compassion”.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
First thing worth noting is that spelling mistakes can be surprisingly hard to notice, particularly if you're focusing on other aspects, like choice of font, etc.
That said, I think it's an example of a modern British malaise whereby junior staff are not encouraged and empowered to correct mistakes - they've not been delegated the authority. The senior people are too busy trying to run everything to answer your question about the spelling. Maybe it's deliberate? A pun you can't spot?
You're so scared of getting in trouble for changing it that you daren't do so, and you just send it on as is.
The end result is that the senior person thinks that everyone junior to them is too stupid to spot a spelling mistake, and so doesn't trust them to do anything. Making the situation worse.
It's like with those cakes where someone ices on the literal text, "Owen with a smiley face in the O". People are just doing exactly what they're told, because they've learned they get in trouble if they try to use their judgement.
More fun if the mistake was made accidentally, spotted, but they let it run so that it would further discredit Kemi…
Arms imports by Israel from UK hits record highs - C4 News
Grenade launcers, parts for bombs, parts for Military Planes amongst the imports
More manufacturing jobs for British workers. Something to applaud.
Genocide ok with you?
Genocide is an overused term. It's horrible in Gaza but to my eyes equating what is going on with previous genocides stretches the term too far. Put it this way - if Israel is attempting genocide they are rubbish at it, considering their military potential.
The slow walk is perfectly explicable by that kind of comment. Take long enough to decimate the population - which they're well on the way to - and the world will just shrug.
Advance: Combat 18 Reform UK: National Front Tories: a smeared fly on a windscreen Labour - One Nation Conservatives LibDems - Blairite Labour Greens - Millibandite Labour YourParty - continuity Corbyn
Advance - Never heard of them Reform - BNP Tories - BNP SKS Lab - BNP LDs - Blairite Labour Greens - Corbyn Party Your Party - Socially Conservative Corbyn Pary
Genuinely excited by the Polanski Greens. Some umph into our politics again. Some of what he is saying is bonkers, but its Bonkers with Feeling, which is better than numb bonkers as we get from Starmer & Badenoch
You are a candidate for the LDs. Shouldn't you be a bit more excited by Davey?
I am. But I am excited by the disruption from the Greens - it is needed. Labour are centre right, so we need a populist left party to replace them.
No centre right party would hammer farmers and small businesses with tax to fund massive pay rises for GPs and train drivers
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
The supermarket I dashed into is Erewhon . “Erewhon is often called the most expensive grocery store in America, positioning wellness and clean eating as a luxury and status symbol. Patronised by celebrities and influencers….”
I just did the equivalent of nipping into the Connaught for a cuppa
lol
The joke is that Whole Foods is 'Whole Wallet', while Erewhon is more like 'Whole Paycheck'.
On the other hand, were I ever to need to start dating again, I'd skip the apps and go to the fresh produce section of Erewhon.
There used to be a Whole Foods near me. It was great for herbs and spices as their tills couldn't weigh small amounts. So 1/2 bag of $spice would come out at zero grammes and zero pence. I'd developed quite a knack for judging what was just below the mark.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
First thing worth noting is that spelling mistakes can be surprisingly hard to notice, particularly if you're focusing on other aspects, like choice of font, etc.
That said, I think it's an example of a modern British malaise whereby junior staff are not encouraged and empowered to correct mistakes - they've not been delegated the authority. The senior people are too busy trying to run everything to answer your question about the spelling. Maybe it's deliberate? A pun you can't spot?
You're so scared of getting in trouble for changing it that you daren't do so, and you just send it on as is.
The end result is that the senior person thinks that everyone junior to them is too stupid to spot a spelling mistake, and so doesn't trust them to do anything. Making the situation worse.
It's like with those cakes where someone ices on the literal text, "Owen with a smiley face in the O". People are just doing exactly what they're told, because they've learned they get in trouble if they try to use their judgement.
My guess is they used an image-gen model and only glanced at it. Three pence? Job's a good un!
To those who would like the Triple Lock to be ended (and I'm not unsympathetic to it as an idea), how would you sell the policy politically?
Many people, when they're not voting against a party, vote on the basis of motivated self-interest. They tend not to vote for parties which they think will make them if not poorer then less well off.
A Margaret Thatcher would go out and make the argument at every opportunity and try to persuade the electorate she was right - she didn't always succeed.
One option might be to say to pensioners - we will continue to keep the basic pension below the personal allowance but you must accept annual rises below the rate of inflation in return.
I'd simply rebrand it the 'inflation-lock' or something thought up by someone better at marketing than me.
Alternatively I'd keep the "triple lock", but carefully adjust the formula to be the greater of inflation, 0% and the lowest temperature recorded in Scotland over the previous 12 months.
Pensions used to be linked to wages, which was changed by the Thatcher government to inflation, which led to Gordon Brown's much-derided 75p increase, and thus indirectly to the triple lock.
I'll be generous and round up to the nearest £1. On an annual basis.
@rcs1000 could engraved his earbuds in this manner, without damaging the innards.
Ultra-fast laser processing can carve into a match head without it igniting, by depositing energy into the material faster than it can conduct into its surroundings. https://x.com/Andercot/status/1975279156037587321
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
They’ll leave the lights on as a protest against net zero.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
A federal judge on Monday declined to block the deployment of National Guard troops to Illinois, a mobilization that the state’s governor, JB Pritzker, labeled an “unconstitutional invasion” by the federal government.
The judge’s ruling, which allows the deployment to move ahead for now, came as a military official said 200 troops from the Texas Guard were headed to Illinois, and lawyers from the Trump administration said they were expected to be deployed by Tuesday or Wednesday. A similar effort to send Texas troops to Portland, Ore., has been blocked for now.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
I'm sorry. The Conservative Party wants to allow the police to just search anyone, without any grounds for suspicion?
That's insane.
The charitable answer is that the Conservatives have gone insane.
The less charitable answer is that they are going for the terrible hypocrite vote; the sort of people who want maximum controls on Other People (nudge nudge wink wink) and none at all on them.
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
I'm sorry. The Conservative Party wants to allow the police to just search anyone, without any grounds for suspicion?
That's insane.
The charitable answer is that the Conservatives have gone insane.
The less charitable answer is that they are going for the terrible hypocrite vote; the sort of people who want maximum controls on Other People (nudge nudge wink wink) and none at all on them.
What police?
They are either all at Make Gaza Great Again marches or they are turning in gangs of six to arrest a 17 year incel who liked a vaguely dodgy comment on X five years ago.
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
Some of the wars Trump thinks he personally stopped:
World War II The Punic Wars The Idiran-Culture war The Wars of the Roses Star Wars
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
Some of the wars Trump thinks he personally stopped:
World War II The Punic Wars The Idiran-Culture war The Wars of the Roses Star Wars
The Second Punic War was stopped by Carthage who picked that absolute loser Hannibal Barca to lead them in battle.
Jenrick is marginally less useless but repellent in other ways.
There is scarcely a Tory MP left who has the first clue what Conservatism is or understands why the party has gone so wrong in recent years. Until that changes the party is doomed to irrelevance.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
I'm not sure that's true - YouGov have Ref beating Con by 12% to 7% in the 18-24 age group. For 25-49 it's Ref 24, Con 13. Even Labour are polling better than the Conservatives in the 50-64 age group.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
For now there are two interesting questions about the future of the Tories: 1) Can they do well enough to split the right vote roughly equally and enable Lab/LDs to form the next government. 2) If Reform form a government can Tories keep going long enough to be around to pick up the pieces for right leaning people when Reform collapse.
Question: Are any Tory grandees/elder statesmen at the conference this year?
This former One Nation Tory is going to vote for whichever of Lab or LD has most chance of winning (Labour as it happens where I live) until sanity returns.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
For now there are two interesting questions about the future of the Tories: 1) Can they do well enough to split the right vote roughly equally and enable Lab/LDs to form the next government. 2) If Reform form a government can Tories keep going long enough to be around to pick up the pieces for right leaning people when Reform collapse.
Question: Are any Tory grandees/elder statesmen at the conference this year?
This former One Nation Tory is going to vote for whichever of Lab or LD has most chance of winning (Labour as it happens where I live) until sanity returns.
There's a 1.1) Will they continue a race to the right and entirely abandon the centre? The ICE stuff yesterday would suggest so.
It really depends if all these previously NOTA voters come out for the two right-wing parties in the way they did for Brexit. If they don't, there simply aren't enough votes that far along the spectrum to support the two of Ref/Con.
That massive Crimean oil terminal does appear to be still, umm, experiencing operational difficulties, following last night’s unexpected conflagration.
The Tyumen oil refinery, nearly 2,000km from Ukraine, may also now have been hit.
It's a middle-sized refinery that hasn't been hit before.
Ukraine do seem to be stepping up the tempo of their attacks on Russian oil refineries.
It’s almost as if someone just gave them a lot of Storm Shadows to play with
The range of storm shadow is only 250km. I don't think Russian air defences are yet so weak that Ukrainian jets are roaming deep into Russian airspace.
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
Some of the wars Trump thinks he personally stopped:
World War II The Punic Wars The Idiran-Culture war The Wars of the Roses Star Wars
The Second Punic War was stopped by Carthage who picked that absolute loser Hannibal Barca to lead them in battle.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
I'm not sure that's true - YouGov have Ref beating Con by 12% to 7% in the 18-24 age group. For 25-49 it's Ref 24, Con 13. Even Labour are polling better than the Conservatives in the 50-64 age group.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
Yougov and many other pollsters have had the Conservatives ahead of Reform with 18 to 24s in recent months.
Though overall the trend is to the white nationalist right over the centre right here as in the US, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and to some extent Germany.
If the trend continues I would not be surprised to see a near all out war between white nationalists and Muslims and the woke left in our towns and cities in a decade or two. Maybe even a Fascist government in some western nations, others seeing further growth in the populist left
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
It is hard to see the Tories as anything other than existing in a state of terminal decline. The whole gathering gives off an aura of sad desperation.
As a centre right voter, I am not particularly sad to see the Tory Party itself dwindle - it has had a good innings but nothing lasts forever and after putting us all through the psychodrama of the last years of their government I am hardly surprised that people have given up on them. God knows who I vote for next time round though.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
I'm not sure that's true - YouGov have Ref beating Con by 12% to 7% in the 18-24 age group. For 25-49 it's Ref 24, Con 13. Even Labour are polling better than the Conservatives in the 50-64 age group.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
Yougov and many other pollsters have had the Conservatives ahead of Reform with 18 to 24s in recent months.
Though overall the trend is to the white nationalist right over the centre right here as in the US, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and to some extent Germany.
If the trend continues I would not be surprised to see a near all out war between white nationalists and Muslims and the woke left in our towns and cities in a decade or two. Maybe even a Fascist government in some western nations, others seeing further growth in the populist left
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
I'm not sure that's true - YouGov have Ref beating Con by 12% to 7% in the 18-24 age group. For 25-49 it's Ref 24, Con 13. Even Labour are polling better than the Conservatives in the 50-64 age group.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
Yougov and many other pollsters have had the Conservatives ahead of Reform with 18 to 24s in recent months.
Though overall the trend is to the white nationalist right over the centre right here as in the US, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and to some extent Germany.
If the trend continues I would not be surprised to see a near all out war between white nationalists and Muslims and the woke left in our towns and cities in a decade or two. Maybe even a Fascist government in some western nations, others seeing further growth in the populist left
The populist left isn’t doing particularly well anywhere. The only exceptions are those where there is a nationalist identitarian angle, as with some pro-Putin types in Eastern Europe.
The new cleavage seems more to be between the populist right and the internationist liberal centre. We see this pattern in action in France, Poland, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Turkey and so on.
So we’re going back to the enemies of the people and this should set alarm bells ringing because once you open up this Pandora’s Box “ activist “ will be used to label any judge that the government doesn’t like.
That chocolate bar. Understand the process: 1) Ideation - lets hand out Cadbury bars with a slogan on the wrapper 2) Design - a template is made and slogans written 3) Approval - someone signs off the file to print 4) Creation - printer receives the file, pisses himself, fulfils the contract. Box(es) of labels sent to CCHQ 5) Wrappers are removed from Cadbury bars and the new wrapper is applied and glued 6) Slogan chocs packed into boxes 7) Boxes unpacked and the contents put into goody bags for delegates and hacks
At multiple points people had eyeballs on the wrapper. Design, approval, wrapping, distribution
So either: it's deliberate mendacious wrecking. Or the party is grotesquely monumentally stupid.
Even at the last minute once they started bing handed out surely someone would notice not spelt gud and pull them back.
How the hell did this happen?
The other possibility is a variant on the "grotesquely monumentally stupid" theory.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Broadly, almost anybody under 50, who is on the Right, now supports Reform. Their supporters’ age profile now resembles that of the Conservatives, in the past. It increases with age, but a significant minority of young people support them.
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
Except that isn't entirely true, indeed the only age group the Conservatives now still regularly lead Reform in polls is 18 to 24s. The only age group Kemi has made gains with since the last general election rather than losses is under 30s
I'm not sure that's true - YouGov have Ref beating Con by 12% to 7% in the 18-24 age group. For 25-49 it's Ref 24, Con 13. Even Labour are polling better than the Conservatives in the 50-64 age group.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
Yougov and many other pollsters have had the Conservatives ahead of Reform with 18 to 24s in recent months.
Though overall the trend is to the white nationalist right over the centre right here as in the US, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and to some extent Germany.
If the trend continues I would not be surprised to see a near all out war between white nationalists and Muslims and the woke left in our towns and cities in a decade or two. Maybe even a Fascist government in some western nations, others seeing further growth in the populist left
The populist left isn’t doing particularly well anywhere. The only exceptions are those where there is a nationalist identitarian angle, as with some pro-Putin types in Eastern Europe.
The new cleavage seems more to be between the populist right and the internationist liberal centre. We see this pattern in action in France, Poland, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Turkey and so on.
Melenchon's populist left block has most seats in the French Assembly. Corbyn got 40% of the vote in 2017 and the Polanski Greens are already polling over 10%. Podemos are in government in Spain. Linke are on over 10% in Germany. Bernie Sanders won many primaries in 2016 and 2020.
The west is now converging on three blocks, nationalist right and liberal centre as you say but also populist left too. The Conservatives problem is they are about two thirds nationalist right and a third liberal centre now
If AI leads to loss of permanent jobs with no replacement then the populist left will grow yet further to hammer corporations and the rich with tax to fund UBIs
Conservative party will go in to the next election with a pledge to protect the triple lock (which would keep it in place until at least 2034), a spokesman says.
State pension is exempted from the £47bn in spending cuts set out by Mel Stride in his conference speech just now.
Without wishing to defend Mel Pillock, it is completely impossible politically to ditch the triple lock. Eliminating NI, raising income tax, and therefore bringing pensions within the scope of taxable income is a milder way of redressing the balance.
Unfortunately, in this particular climate and against this political backdrop the Tories would be signing their own death warrant (more than they are doing already) by pledging to abolish the triple lock.
I don't like that, but I can accept the political realty. In a similar way that Cameron needed to "share the proceeds of growth" rather than talk about spending cuts until the GFC, because otherwise he would run straight into the Labour line of attack about cutting the NHS/public services which was their trump card from 1997-2008.
There will perhaps come a time and a place when someone will have political cover to abolish it, but that time is not now.
It doesn't have to be abolished, just tweaked very slightly. You could replace 'ax' with 'in' or the whole word with average.
Rebrand it the “quadruple lock”. New condition is “never above the personal allowance”
That’s my idea and naming.
Pistols for two upon Hyde park, breakfast for one at White’s?
That massive Crimean oil terminal does appear to be still, umm, experiencing operational difficulties, following last night’s unexpected conflagration.
The Tyumen oil refinery, nearly 2,000km from Ukraine, may also now have been hit.
It's a middle-sized refinery that hasn't been hit before.
Ukraine do seem to be stepping up the tempo of their attacks on Russian oil refineries.
It’s almost as if someone just gave them a lot of Storm Shadows to play with
The range of storm shadow is only 250km. I don't think Russian air defences are yet so weak that Ukrainian jets are roaming deep into Russian airspace.
550km
Oops, yes.
I made the mistake of relying on the AI summary from my search, rather than reading a more reliable source.
Still, the oil refinery is nearly four times further away.
It is hard to see the Tories as anything other than existing in a state of terminal decline. The whole gathering gives off an aura of sad desperation.
As a centre right voter, I am not particularly sad to see the Tory Party itself dwindle - it has had a good innings but nothing lasts forever and after putting us all through the psychodrama of the last years of their government I am hardly surprised that people have given up on them. God knows who I vote for next time round though.
Cleverly would still get most liberal centre right voters like you I suspect. Jenrick and Kemi now too it seems trying their Farage tribute act would see more go to Davey and the LDs
It is hard to see the Tories as anything other than existing in a state of terminal decline. The whole gathering gives off an aura of sad desperation.
As a centre right voter, I am not particularly sad to see the Tory Party itself dwindle - it has had a good innings but nothing lasts forever and after putting us all through the psychodrama of the last years of their government I am hardly surprised that people have given up on them. God knows who I vote for next time round though.
Cleverly would still get most liberal centre right voters like you I suspect. Jenrick and Kemi now too it seems trying their Farage tribute act would see more go to Davey and the LDs
The members won't vote for Cleverly, and Jenrick isn't going to stand down to allow a coronation.
Kemi is against ID cards as it is an attack on civil liberties but
Tories to give wider stop and search power in crime hotspots
Under the Conservative proposals, police in 2,000 areas would be able to act without having grounds for suspicion
Officers would be given sweeping powers to stop and search anyone in the 2,000 areas of the country with the highest crime rates under Conservative proposals.
Police will for the first time be allowed to search people without first having grounds for suspicion, Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, will announce on Tuesday. The powers would be used in the areas with the highest rates of robbery, theft, burglary, violence, drug dealing and antisocial behaviour.
Police forces would be threatened with funding cuts if they refused to use the powers, which would be combined with an “intensive” deployment of live facial recognition cameras installed on police vans and fixed to lampposts.
That massive Crimean oil terminal does appear to be still, umm, experiencing operational difficulties, following last night’s unexpected conflagration.
The Tyumen oil refinery, nearly 2,000km from Ukraine, may also now have been hit.
It's a middle-sized refinery that hasn't been hit before.
Ukraine do seem to be stepping up the tempo of their attacks on Russian oil refineries.
It’s almost as if someone just gave them a lot of Storm Shadows to play with
The range of storm shadow is only 250km. I don't think Russian air defences are yet so weak that Ukrainian jets are roaming deep into Russian airspace.
550km
Oops, yes.
I made the mistake of relying on the AI summary from my search, rather than reading a more reliable source.
Still, the oil refinery is nearly four times further away.
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
Some of the wars Trump thinks he personally stopped:
World War II The Punic Wars The Idiran-Culture war The Wars of the Roses Star Wars
The Second Punic War was stopped by Carthage who picked that absolute loser Hannibal Barca to lead them in battle.
Comments
Take long enough to decimate the population - which they're well on the way to - and the world will just shrug.
The actual functioning of politics has depended, for all my life, on a cohort of bright young things, mostly graduates, prepared to do lots of work for relatively little money. There was a splendid example who came and shook things up on the Solent coast for a bit, until the activists make it clear that they didn't like being shook up, dayglo posters and whatnot. The supply of such people is partly about belief in the cause and partly about getting a foot in the door for something better later.
Now consider the Conservative predicament. There are approximately no Tory Boys left- hardly anyone under the age of about 50 votes for them. Partly Brexit, partly all the other social stuff, mostly because the Conservative Party have made it clear that working aged people are viewed as cash cows to fund pensioners. So you can forget people working for a cause they belive in. And there's not much point in getting your foot in the door of a building that is on fire. So forget the careerists.
I'd say "would the last campaign professional turn out the lights", except it's possibly too late for that. Simpler to wait for the electricity to be cut off for non-payment of bills.
Oh.
Ukraine 'strikes oil terminal in Crimea and key Russian explosives factory'
https://x.com/SkyNews/status/1975293271120228817
Ultra-fast laser processing can carve into a match head without it igniting, by depositing energy into the material faster than it can conduct into its surroundings.
https://x.com/Andercot/status/1975279156037587321
Gavin Newsom
@GavinNewsom
·
1h
STATES CANNOT INVADE ONE ANOTHER.
This is so simple -- so fundamental to America -- I cannot believe I have to type those words.
America is on the brink of martial law.
@Acyn
·
1h
Stephen Miller asks when in our history have we tolerated unlawful, riotous assemblies around government buildings
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1975273285060596126
https://x.com/dannythefink/status/1975158878137458906?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
That's insane.
The judge’s ruling, which allows the deployment to move ahead for now, came as a military official said 200 troops from the Texas Guard were headed to Illinois, and lawyers from the Trump administration said they were expected to be deployed by Tuesday or Wednesday. A similar effort to send Texas troops to Portland, Ore., has been blocked for now.
NY Times live blog
They could have run a pilot scheme last weekend.
I don't use twitter. Never have.
The less charitable answer is that they are going for the terrible hypocrite vote; the sort of people who want maximum controls on Other People (nudge nudge wink wink) and none at all on them.
https://x.com/theliamnissan/status/1975263727650762798
Written constitutions are only as good as those in charge of them.
And the Al Capone is now in charge.
"Sadly, he can" or
"Sadly, he can" ?
Unless the King goes rogue a government with bad intentions could do tremendous damage to the country and its people .
@atrupar.com
COLLINS: Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell -- is that something you're open to doing?
TRUMP: Who are we talking about?
C: Ghislaine Maxwell
T: I haven't heard the name is so long. I can say this -- I'd have to take a look at it ... I will speak to the DOJ
C: She's convicted of child sex trafficking
Tesla's German car sales fall in September though wider EV sales jump
@atrupar.com
Trump: "I've ended seven wars. At least half of them was because of my ability at trade and because of tariffs. If I didn't have tariffs to throw around a little bit, you would have at least 4 wars waging with thousands of people a day being killed ... we're getting close to settling 8."
All organisations run their course, eventually, and that’s likely true of the Conservatives. They are no longer relevant, in the voters’ eyes.
They are either all at Make Gaza Great Again marches or they are turning in gangs of six to arrest a 17 year incel who liked a vaguely dodgy comment on X five years ago.
World War II
The Punic Wars
The Idiran-Culture war
The Wars of the Roses
Star Wars
Jenrick is marginally less useless but repellent in other ways.
There is scarcely a Tory MP left who has the first clue what Conservatism is or understands why the party has gone so wrong in recent years. Until that changes the party is doomed to irrelevance.
Just a bit tragic really. I think we'll regret our politics replicating the America in the long term.
1) Can they do well enough to split the right vote roughly equally and enable Lab/LDs to form the next government.
2) If Reform form a government can Tories keep going long enough to be around to pick up the pieces for right leaning people when Reform collapse.
Question: Are any Tory grandees/elder statesmen at the conference this year?
This former One Nation Tory is going to vote for whichever of Lab or LD has most chance of winning (Labour as it happens where I live) until sanity returns.
It really depends if all these previously NOTA voters come out for the two right-wing parties in the way they did for Brexit. If they don't, there simply aren't enough votes that far along the spectrum to support the two of Ref/Con.
months.
Though overall the trend is to
the white nationalist right over
the centre right here as in the
US, France, Italy, Sweden, the
Netherlands and to some
extent Germany.
If the trend continues I would not be surprised to see a near all out war between white nationalists and Muslims and the woke left in our towns and cities in a decade or two. Maybe even a Fascist government in some western nations, others seeing further growth in the populist left
In the high crime areas you just need more Jan Michael Vincents.
As a centre right voter, I am not particularly sad to see the Tory Party itself dwindle - it has had a good innings but nothing lasts forever and after putting us all through the psychodrama of the last years of their government I am hardly surprised that people have given up on them. God knows who I vote for next time round though.
The new cleavage seems more to be between the populist right and the internationist liberal centre. We see this pattern in action in France, Poland, Germany, Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Turkey and so on.
So we’re going back to the enemies of the people and this should set alarm bells ringing because once you open up this Pandora’s Box “ activist “ will be used to label any judge that the government doesn’t like.
Jenrick really is a loathsome individual .
most seats in the French
Assembly. Corbyn got 40% of
the vote in 2017 and the
Polanski Greens are already
polling over 10%. Podemos are
in government in Spain. Linke
are on over 10% in Germany. Bernie Sanders won many primaries in 2016 and 2020.
The west is now converging on three blocks, nationalist right and liberal centre as you say but also populist left too. The Conservatives problem is they are about two thirds nationalist right and a third liberal centre now
If AI leads to loss of permanent jobs with no replacement then the populist left will grow yet further to hammer corporations and the rich with tax to fund UBIs
Pistols for two upon Hyde park, breakfast for one at White’s?
I made the mistake of relying on the AI summary from my search, rather than reading a more reliable source.
Still, the oil refinery is nearly four times further away.
Just frisk the conference after parties, should be a high success rate.