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The end of the Keir show might be delayed – politicalbetting.com

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  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135
    edited 9:16PM
    DoctorG said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Anyone remember did George Gardner ever sit in the commons as a Ref MP?
    Seem to remember someone who used to be a Tory MP standing against the Tories for Referendum party at one point
    He did, for two weeks.

    Edit - He also stood for the Referendum Party in Reigate in 1997, he finished fourth, the winner was some chap called Crispin Blunt, whatever happened to him?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 39,667
    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 5,063

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    Here's the same story but in The Guardian, which I shared the last time this came up - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/03/conservationists-oppose-proposal-allow-fishing-chagos-islands

    I doubt the Telegraph or its readership gives a toss about fish banks or the fate of the silky shark, but I do, and I've long said that the worst part of the Chagos deal is the adverse effect it will have on marine life. Not just in the protected region, but in the whole ocean (which the protected region helps to repopulate), which humanity is sadly plundering into extinction.
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 7,438
    RobD said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    The report is real, however: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52026SC0068
    It’s not really news given the EU have had an agreement for years with Mauritius . This is just more concocted hysteria from the DT which has become a joke paper full of anti EU bilge .
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369

    isam said:

    EXCL: Labour insiders say Ed Miliband's wife is desperate for him not to run for the Labour leadership.

    They say she has been let traumatised by the 'Two Kitchens Miliband' row which erupted in 2015 when Ed was last party leader.


    https://x.com/kateferguson4/status/2037969740660932860?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

    Is she worried about a third kitchen being discovered?
    Like Mrs Milliband I suspect we would also all be traumatised by her husband becoming Leader of the Labour Party.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 47,243
    isam said:
    Can’t be arsed clicking on the link, but I imagine a Jewish leader might be an obstacle.
  • Brixian59Brixian59 Posts: 1,713
    nico67 said:

    RobD said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    The report is real, however: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52026SC0068
    It’s not really news given the EU have had an agreement for years with Mauritius . This is just more concocted hysteria from the DT which has become a joke paper full of anti EU bilge .
    Sell Chagos to China

    Every future edition of the Telegraph, Mail, Express will self compost

    Do us all a favour
  • Brixian59Brixian59 Posts: 1,713

    Can I just say it is absolute fucking bollocks that the clocks are going forward on the night of the Japanese Grand Prix.

    I am either going to wake up two hours before it is due to start or wake up an hour into the race.

    Starmer needs to pass a law to stop the clocks changing during Grand Prix weekends.

    Formula 1 E is unwatchable.

    It's utterly dire video game level stuff.

    Bring back the 2025 variant, or the Sport will die and end up like Formula E, Car Park Racing
  • TresTres Posts: 3,545
    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    didnt know he was a keynesian
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369
    RobD said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    The report is real, however: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52026SC0068
    That was a tough and time consuming read. I thought the Truss Chagos deal was predicted on international court determinations.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135
    Brixian59 said:

    Can I just say it is absolute fucking bollocks that the clocks are going forward on the night of the Japanese Grand Prix.

    I am either going to wake up two hours before it is due to start or wake up an hour into the race.

    Starmer needs to pass a law to stop the clocks changing during Grand Prix weekends.

    Formula 1 E is unwatchable.

    It's utterly dire video game level stuff.

    Bring back the 2025 variant, or the Sport will die and end up like Formula E, Car Park Racing
    It's the best, watching Max Verstappen struggle and moan like a whore makes this best F1 season ever.
  • Brixian59Brixian59 Posts: 1,713
    ohnotnow said:

    Cookie said:

    a

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Idea to make everyone (left and right) scream -

    Have a child and get a 4 bed house. Free.
    I was quite pleased when Trafford Council gave me an 80 litre wheelybin for general waste once we became a family of 5 rather than the standard 40 litre one.
    General Waste - inventor of the dust bin!
    I've only just remembered the 80s classic 'Dusty Bin'.

    God, the 80s were awful
    Ted Rogers was like watching a Kemi Badenoch speech.

    He just ended up totally confusing everyone and contradicting himself
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 78,258

    Brixian59 said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    Yawn

    Sell it to China

    Give Trump something to really bellyache about.
    Giving it to Ukraine would make more sense if that's the objective.
    Be original. Mess with everyone’s heads by making a free gift of it to Argentina.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 78,258

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135
    Queen Elizabeth II's legacy keeps on getting worse day by day. first her actions towards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, now this.

    We should stop naming stuff after the royals.

    Millionaires fear Queen Elizabeth II's memorial will be used as a hiding place for muggers and cause a surge in antisocial behaviour

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15687937/Millionaires-fear-Queen-Elizabeth-memorial-used-muggers-antisocial-behaviour.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 47,243
    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you but ‘we’ are all going to die out in any case.

  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 78,258
    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    I'm intrigued, where's this country that has youthful women giving birth causing everyone to live for ever?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
    I don't count him either but others do.

    I pointed out if the only MP you ever had only came via defection and not via the ballot box then it really shouldn't count, it's like losing your virginity to a prostitute.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061

    Queen Elizabeth II's legacy keeps on getting worse day by day. first her actions towards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, now this.

    We should stop naming stuff after the royals.

    Millionaires fear Queen Elizabeth II's memorial will be used as a hiding place for muggers and cause a surge in antisocial behaviour

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15687937/Millionaires-fear-Queen-Elizabeth-memorial-used-muggers-antisocial-behaviour.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline

    Could be said about any monument
  • RobDRobD Posts: 60,977

    Queen Elizabeth II's legacy keeps on getting worse day by day. first her actions towards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, now this.

    We should stop naming stuff after the royals.

    Millionaires fear Queen Elizabeth II's memorial will be used as a hiding place for muggers and cause a surge in antisocial behaviour

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15687937/Millionaires-fear-Queen-Elizabeth-memorial-used-muggers-antisocial-behaviour.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline

    Bunch of NIMBYs.
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 4,581
    HYUFD said:

    Queen Elizabeth II's legacy keeps on getting worse day by day. first her actions towards Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, now this.

    We should stop naming stuff after the royals.

    Millionaires fear Queen Elizabeth II's memorial will be used as a hiding place for muggers and cause a surge in antisocial behaviour

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15687937/Millionaires-fear-Queen-Elizabeth-memorial-used-muggers-antisocial-behaviour.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline

    Could be said about any monument
    It's terrible news for my proposed new Trojan Horse memorial.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 9,538

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    So?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061
    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 28,092
    edited 9:37PM
    AnneJGP said:

    viewcode said:

    FF43 said:

    .

    So the laundry fire was bullshit, or has Trump been playing the wrong video game?

    True Promise - الوعد الصادق ✪🇮🇷
    @IRTruePromise
    1h
    Trump: "They hit world's biggest aircraft carrier from 17 angles we ran for our lives it was over"

    https://x.com/IRTruePromise/status/2037800464150839571?s=20

    That’s Iranian propaganda and misinformation so you should really post it. It’s well done though, I’ll give them that
    Indeed. The laundry fire story is seemingly bullshit though as the Ford doesn't have a laundry that could catch fire that way, precisely to avoid this situation.

    My speculation - only speculation - is a mutiny or something close to it.
    This guy reckons the laundry fire was real, but there was also a sotto-voce revolt amongst the seamen (long tour of duty) combined with a really stupid toilet design and plumbing. In short, they can't sleep (not enough berths), can't wash, can't poo, can't get clean clothes and have been at sea too long. Plus USN vessels are nonalcoholic.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5fsq1hvqo
    At 3:46 or so, aircraft are taking off with what looks like some sort of lid or hatch open - what/why is that, please?
    @AnneJGP , The F35 is a plane made by Lockheed, with contributions from BAe and others. It is meant as a tri-service aircraft: different variants are used by the Air Force, Navy and Marines. The Marine version is the vertical or short-take-off-and-landing (STOL) version, called the F35B. It has an extra engine at the front, just behind the pilot. That engine points downwards and gives the aircraft more lift during take-off and landing. This enables the plane to land easily on the smaller aircraft carriers.

    To enable the extra engine to get enough air, the lid opens during take-off and landing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm25JeVk_wY

    We use the same plane for the same reason. Because we don't have arrestor gear on our carriers, we use a technique called shipborne rolling vertical landing (SRVL), which is a combination of vertical landing and short landing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mubSrcrLpG4
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP0rUkDz_Fg
  • eekeek Posts: 33,061
    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    How would that work with people not entering the job market to 21/22 and wanting to get somewhere before taking a break
  • MelonBMelonB Posts: 16,970
    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 58,493
    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061
    edited 9:48PM

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Macron's former PM Philippe after he was re elected as Mayor of Le Havre is Bardella's likely run off opponent and on those polls the only candidate who has a chance to beat him.

    Either way it will be a shift right, Philippe has his own centre right party now, Horizons, Bardella is obviously nationalist right, and even Retailleau who does next best after Phillippe v Bardella leads Les Republicains. Whereas Glucksmann is leader of the Socialists in the European Parliament and Melenchon leads the hard left LFI.

    The right has not won a French presidential election since Sarkozy won in 2007 19 years ago. Hollande winning in 2012 for the Socialists and Macron winning in 2017 and 2022 for the liberal centre with Socialists and Macron's party also winning the French legislative elections in that time
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061
    edited 9:52PM
    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 58,493

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061
    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    How would that work with people not entering the job market to 21/22 and wanting to get somewhere before taking a break
    Quite easily, you have 3 or 4 years and then you have a child, of course the working class enter the job market at 16-18 and have their children on average several years younger than the university attending more career focused middle class
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    Almost exactly the same margin
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 19,636
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
    He led a party. That party had a huge influence on British politics. What more do you want?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369
    geoffw said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    So?
    There is plenty of material that justifies criticism of Starmer's tenure as Prime Minister, but the Telegraph in particular create false or misleading narratives to kick him further.

    The Chagos arrangement is a case in point. It would seem to me that those who are triggered by Starmer are triggered by Chagos. These players also create a narrative that Starmer has had a chaotic war which they initially compared to Farage and Badenoch's righteous resolution to support Trump and Netanyahu at all costs. I remember a post on here claiming Starmer was "weak, weak, weak" yet when their narrative faltered they went after Starmer by crusing his approval of US defensive action in the Gulf. So to the Telegraph and PB's Telegraph groupies, Starmer was wrong to decline Trump's request to launch the illegal Iran War from Chagos yet now he is wrong to let the USAF defend the Gulf states from Fairford.

    Starmer is a poor Prime Minister in lots of ways, so why do the Telegraph etc. have to make up shite?
  • MelonBMelonB Posts: 16,970
    HYUFD said:

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Macron's former PM Philippe after he was re elected as Mayor of Le Havre is Bardella's likely run off opponent and on those polls the only candidate who has a chance to beat him.

    Either way it will be a shift right, Philippe has his own centre right party now, Horizons, Bardella is obviously nationalist right, and even Retailleau who does next best after Phillippe v Bardella leads Les Republicains. Whereas Glucksmann is leader of the Socialists in the European Parliament and Melenchon leads the hard left LFI.

    The right has not won a French presidential election since Sarkozy won in 2007 19 years ago. Hollande winning in 2012 for the Socialists and Macron winning in 2017 and 2022 for the liberal centre with Socialists and Macron's party also winning the French legislative elections in that time
    The French propensity to create and rename parties as fast as Damon Albarn creates bands is always fascinating.

    The exact opposite of the US system.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 135,061

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
    He led a party. That party had a huge influence on British politics. What more do you want?
    Sir James the first party leader to really call for a referendum on leaving the EU, the Referendum Party got 2.6% of the vote under his leadership in 1997 ahead of UKIP on 0.3%
  • RobDRobD Posts: 60,977

    geoffw said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    So?
    There is plenty of material that justifies criticism of Starmer's tenure as Prime Minister, but the Telegraph in particular create false or misleading narratives to kick him further.

    The Chagos arrangement is a case in point. It would seem to me that those who are triggered by Starmer are triggered by Chagos. These players also create a narrative that Starmer has had a chaotic war which they initially compared to Farage and Badenoch's righteous resolution to support Trump and Netanyahu at all costs. I remember a post on here claiming Starmer was "weak, weak, weak" yet when their narrative faltered they went after Starmer by crusing his approval of US defensive action in the Gulf. So to the Telegraph and PB's Telegraph groupies, Starmer was wrong to decline Trump's request to launch the illegal Iran War from Chagos yet now he is wrong to let the USAF defend the Gulf states from Fairford.

    Starmer is a poor Prime Minister in lots of ways, so why do the Telegraph etc. have to make up shite?
    Except it isn't made up, I linked the report from the EU earlier in the thread.
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 58,705
    ohnotnow said:

    Cookie said:

    a

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Idea to make everyone (left and right) scream -

    Have a child and get a 4 bed house. Free.
    I was quite pleased when Trafford Council gave me an 80 litre wheelybin for general waste once we became a family of 5 rather than the standard 40 litre one.
    General Waste - inventor of the dust bin!
    I've only just remembered the 80s classic 'Dusty Bin'.

    God, the 80s were awful
    I used to love "3-2-1" as a kid!
  • RobDRobD Posts: 60,977
    isam said:
    Boris in 2026 talking to Boris in 2019?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    In that case to make your point did you need to repeat Bardella beating all comers? It seems to me you were repeating what you posted yesterday that Bardella is almost invincible. If the point was Bardella's dominance is no longer universal shouldn't you have pointed that out?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 49,775
    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    Yes, the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. But not by voting for a party that is basically the voice of 2016 Leave voters who haven't died yet.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369
    RobD said:

    geoffw said:

    geoffw said:

    Well well Chagos gets even worse ...

    "EU plot to seize Chagos fishing rights after Starmer’s surrender
    One of world’s largest protected marine areas at risk of ‘catastrophic’ exploitation by French and Spanish vessels
    "

    "The European Union has been accused of seeking to exploit Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands surrender by securing fishing rights in the waters of the British territory.

    Brussels believes the Prime Minister’s plan to transfer sovereignty “could further increase the relevance” of its existing fishing agreement with Mauritius by opening swathes of ocean around the Chagos Islands to French and Spanish vessels.

    A report from the European Commission, seen by The Telegraph, reveals it is watching Britain’s Chagos deal with great interest.

    The document, published this month, says the deal could open the door to fishing licences in a major boost to European-owned trawlers."

    etc, more here:
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/61124e980439f9c7

    IT'S THE TELEGRAPH!
    So?
    There is plenty of material that justifies criticism of Starmer's tenure as Prime Minister, but the Telegraph in particular create false or misleading narratives to kick him further.

    The Chagos arrangement is a case in point. It would seem to me that those who are triggered by Starmer are triggered by Chagos. These players also create a narrative that Starmer has had a chaotic war which they initially compared to Farage and Badenoch's righteous resolution to support Trump and Netanyahu at all costs. I remember a post on here claiming Starmer was "weak, weak, weak" yet when their narrative faltered they went after Starmer by crusing his approval of US defensive action in the Gulf. So to the Telegraph and PB's Telegraph groupies, Starmer was wrong to decline Trump's request to launch the illegal Iran War from Chagos yet now he is wrong to let the USAF defend the Gulf states from Fairford.

    Starmer is a poor Prime Minister in lots of ways, so why do the Telegraph etc. have to make up shite?
    Except it isn't made up, I linked the report from the EU earlier in the thread.
    And I read it.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 19,636
    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
    He led a party. That party had a huge influence on British politics. What more do you want?
    Sir James the first party leader to really call for a referendum on leaving the EU, the Referendum Party got 2.6% of the vote under his leadership in 1997 ahead of UKIP on 0.3%
    It’s also where Rupert Lowe got his start.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 49,775
    edited 10:16PM
    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    It's true that a major reversal of female emancipation would probably increase the birth rate but I don't think this should be aspired to.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 63,704
    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 63,704
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    It's true that a major reversal of female emancipation would probably increase the birth rate but I don't think this should be aspired to.
    Personally, I would work on things that make being a mother and a parent easier: you know, like decent childcare, affordable housing, and the like.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369
    rcs1000 said:

    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    It's true that a major reversal of female emancipation would probably increase the birth rate but I don't think this should be aspired to.
    Personally, I would work on things that make being a mother and a parent easier: you know, like decent childcare, affordable housing, and the like.
    I have a great idea and we could call it "Surestart".
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369

    HYUFD said:

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    Erm...


    Zack Polanski
    @ZackPolanski

    For whoever needs to hear this I'm the only Jewish person to lead a political party - third largest in the country.

    https://x.com/ZackPolanski/status/2037965284124836204

    I presume he means at present, rather than ever. Wikipedia has him as the sixth Jewish person to lead a political party in the UK, and that's not counting Tony Cliff founding the SWP.
    Disraeli, Samuel, Howard, Miliband.

    Who's the other? Serious question as I'm struggling to work it out.
    This tripped me up a few years ago.

    Wikipedia (and some other resources) list Sir Jimmy Goldsmith for his stint as leader of the Referendum Party.

    He counts because for a while they had one MP.
    Elected as a Conservative though, I think? So not really valid.

    I certainly wouldn’t count him as a party leader.
    He led a party. That party had a huge influence on British politics. What more do you want?
    Sir James the first party leader to really call for a referendum on leaving the EU, the Referendum Party got 2.6% of the vote under his leadership in 1997 ahead of UKIP on 0.3%
    It’s also where Rupert Lowe got his start.
    Didn't he start out in a cartoon strip in the Daily Express?
  • isamisam Posts: 43,903

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    In that case to make your point did you need to repeat Bardella beating all comers? It seems to me you were repeating what you posted yesterday that Bardella is almost invincible. If the point was Bardella's dominance is no longer universal shouldn't you have pointed that out?
    Yes come on @williamglenn, you know full well how reposting polls that Pete doesn’t like are a trigger for his issues. Maybe some kind of ration is in order, or just let Mex decide what we can and can’t do, political polling wise
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 70,916
    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
  • eekeek Posts: 33,061

    HYUFD said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    100 years ago most parents rented their entire life. Both couples earning has pushed up house prices too, if more women were stay at home mothers (or a few fathers stay at home dads) that would be less of an issue.

    In the 1970s only 10% went to university, the remaining 90% had children soon after leaving school and their first job. Now 40% go to university but non graduates and working class parents start having children earlier on average
    Though the issue isn't about buying a house being ruionously expensive (though it often is)... it's also that renting is only just affordable, because the market rent anywhere useful is "every last penny you have" because if you're a landlord, why wouldn't you?

    There are some societal problems that are hard to fix, but building enough houses in the vicintiy of places where people work and want to live isn't one of them.
    Have you seen how few houses are being built in large parts of the country - that's often not due to lack of demand, it's just that the prices required to build them makes building them unprofitable.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 58,493

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    In that case to make your point did you need to repeat Bardella beating all comers? It seems to me you were repeating what you posted yesterday that Bardella is almost invincible. If the point was Bardella's dominance is no longer universal shouldn't you have pointed that out?
    The significant thing about this one is that they polled Bardella vs Melenchon which was missing from the other pollster, and it looks like it would be a landslide for Bardella.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 58,493
    Unconfirmed reports that the Speaker of the Iranian parliament (who was apparently negotiating with the US) has been eliminated.

    https://x.com/MOSSADil/status/2038003887580311676
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    I'll never forget when I was at university one of my female tutors telling me that in the 1960s her bank refused her a mortgage because she was unmarried and the only way she would get a mortgage whilst she was unmarried was if a male blood relative agreed to be on the mortgage.

    If she had been a man she would have been approved for the mortgage.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 9,491
    edited 10:35PM
    Some parents have more kids than they want. Mine had two sons and my dad said "that's enough!". But my mother wanted a daughter, so he caved and they had another child. That was me; to my mother's eternal disappointment, a third son.
    As punishment, for the first two years of my life I was stuck in a pram at the bottom of the garden, just allowed in the house at night.
  • FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 5,922

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    Yes, this was quite common.

    My father in law was told to make all the married women redundant first when the business he worked for was making cuts.

    Some were allowed to continue working, but once children arrived then that was it.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369
    isam said:

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    In that case to make your point did you need to repeat Bardella beating all comers? It seems to me you were repeating what you posted yesterday that Bardella is almost invincible. If the point was Bardella's dominance is no longer universal shouldn't you have pointed that out?
    Yes come on @williamglenn, you know full well how reposting polls that Pete doesn’t like are a trigger for his issues. Maybe some kind of ration is in order, or just let Mex decide what we can and can’t do, political polling wise
    @williamglenn is a very astute commentator, his analysis post the Brexit vote was particularly helpful. It was up there with Alistair Meek's commentary.

    William can propose his narrative better without using iffy material like polling on projected candidates. We have been warned about the dangers within.

    By the way @Mexicanpete is still not engaging with you, someone must have hacked his account.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 49,775
    rcs1000 said:

    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    It's true that a major reversal of female emancipation would probably increase the birth rate but I don't think this should be aspired to.
    Personally, I would work on things that make being a mother and a parent easier: you know, like decent childcare, affordable housing, and the like.
    Yes, stuff like that. If you build it they will come (as it were). I find the more 'direct' type discourse from politicians about raising the birth rate slightly (or sometimes more than slightly) creepy.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 127,135
    rcs1000 said:

    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    It's true that a major reversal of female emancipation would probably increase the birth rate but I don't think this should be aspired to.
    Personally, I would work on things that make being a mother and a parent easier: you know, like decent childcare, affordable housing, and the like.
    Utter woke nonsense.

    You need to read The Handmaid’s Tale on how to get women making more babies.
  • nico67nico67 Posts: 7,438
    edited 10:36PM
    Oh pass me the sick bag ! Farage suddenly cares about conservation !

    Included in another hysterical anti EU article in the DT is Farage so worried about the state of the planet .
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 19,254

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    At my primary school, Miss So-and-so is leaving to get married was accepted as the perfectly normal reason for resigning. Scotland about 1970.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 38,369

    New French run off polling:

    https://x.com/clement_mci/status/2037998217212609025

    ▪️Bardella : 71,5%
    ▪️Mélenchon : 28,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58,5%
    ▪️Glucksmann : 41,5%

    ▪️Philippe : 51,5%
    ▪️Bardella : 48,5%

    ▪️Bardella : 58%
    ▪️Retailleau : 42%

    Didn't you post this yesterday too?
    No this is different. Bardella was ahead of Philippe in the other poll by 52 to 48.
    In that case to make your point did you need to repeat Bardella beating all comers? It seems to me you were repeating what you posted yesterday that Bardella is almost invincible. If the point was Bardella's dominance is no longer universal shouldn't you have pointed that out?
    The significant thing about this one is that they polled Bardella vs Melenchon which was missing from the other pollster, and it looks like it would be a landslide for Bardella.
    Haven't we been warned before that this sort of polling technique is inherently inaccurate?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 63,704
    All these jobs that people are remembering their mothers (or grandmothers) giving up upon marriage... they're all middle class jobs: in a bank, a teacher, etc.

    Working class women didn't get the same breaks. And there were a lot of working class women.
  • Daveyboy1961Daveyboy1961 Posts: 5,414
    FF43 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    At my primary school, Miss So-and-so is leaving to get married was accepted as the perfectly normal reason for resigning. Scotland about 1970.
    That's why men were called sir and women called miss, not Mrs.
  • TresTres Posts: 3,545

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    I'll never forget when I was at university one of my female tutors telling me that in the 1960s her bank refused her a mortgage because she was unmarried and the only way she would get a mortgage whilst she was unmarried was if a male blood relative agreed to be on the mortgage.

    If she had been a man she would have been approved for the mortgage.
    even in the 80s a married woman would need to get her husbands approval to open a credit card.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 70,916
    rcs1000 said:

    All these jobs that people are remembering their mothers (or grandmothers) giving up upon marriage... they're all middle class jobs: in a bank, a teacher, etc.

    Working class women didn't get the same breaks. And there were a lot of working class women.

    Maybe true, but my point was my aunt was made to give up her job on marriage.
  • FlatlanderFlatlander Posts: 5,922
    rcs1000 said:

    All these jobs that people are remembering their mothers (or grandmothers) giving up upon marriage... they're all middle class jobs: in a bank, a teacher, etc.

    Working class women didn't get the same breaks. And there were a lot of working class women.

    Working class families often used to live in the same house, though, or at least close by. Granny was more likely to be available.

    I wonder what the proportion of childcare done by grandparents is now compared to then? We are much more mobile now.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 49,775

    rcs1000 said:

    HYUFD said:

    MelonB said:

    HYUFD said:

    Andy_JS said:

    kinabalu said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    nico67 said:

    kinabalu said:

    nico67 said:

    AnneJGP said:

    nico67 said:

    A section of older people are a danger to the country . Having screwed their grandkids with the Brexit vote they now seem intent on finishing the country off by voting for the Traitor party .

    Which is the Traitor party? ..... Just so I know who I should be voting for.
    Very funny ! Reform !

    If people voted for Brexit but won’t vote for Reform then they’ll avoid internment ! The double whammy of Brexit and Reform passes the threshold otherwise !
    A soft open prison though. The Maximum Security facility is reserved for MAGA voters in swing states.
    MAGA voters really are on another planet !

    Thankfully the UK remains relatively sane for the timebeing . We have neither an obsession with guns or religion or telling women what to do with their bodies .
    The telling women what to do with their bodies has already entered Reform’s offering: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/13/reform-matt-goodwin-fertility-comments-outcry-handmaids-tale
    He has some point there in that women are more fertile in their twenties and early 30s than their late 30s and early 40s though he could have phrased it a bit more diplomatically
    I think women know that and don’t need Matt Goodwin to tell them, but maybe he has more experience of discussing fertility with young women than I do.
    Rather than telling women to have children earlier, it would be more useful to think about why they rationally choose not to.

    Then we might be able to change society so that women can more easily choose to have children at a younger age if they want to.

    One thing that does come up when you listen to women is that men of a similar age aren't ready to settle down and have kids. Often a woman will have a long-term relationship in which the man is delaying having children for years.

    And, of course, single mothers are a notorious target for the ire of the right, should a woman decide to have a baby when they can't find a man who is ready to do so with them.

    So why isn't Matt Goodwin giving a reality check to men about their duty to be a father and have children? Why is it always the fault of women in his eyes?
    I'd say a bigger factor is the utter unaffordability of it all. There may be a bit of rose-tinted glass here, but for the twenty- somethings of the 1970s it was possible to buy a house and luve as a family of three or four on one income.
    Breeding has become almost unaffordable.
    Matt Goodwin strikes me as being a piece of work and I don't support his politics. What is however intriguing is the extent to which a sentence he writes, itself the sort of subject millions think and think about and is significant to millions of lives, gives rise to a million expansions, interpretations and distortions, all aimed at saying he is a bad person.

    This is what he wrote that has caused all the fuss:

    "Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life. We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

    These words put in softer tones, a querying and kindly expression and as an into to a discussion could have been said by Jenni Murray or Emma Barnett on Women's Hour on R4.

    Nearly all the crits of Goodwin about this are completely ad hominem. There is a vast amount of more sinister material to attack him with.
    I do find it sinister. It's dripping with patriarchal condescension. Is some of this because of who it's coming from rather than the bare words? Yes. But that's integral to understanding something. The message PLUS the medium. Both are relevant. Not (btw) that I'd be a fan of this sort of socio-natal stuff from any politician. Just put forward some policies to encourage men to participate more equally in the rearing of children please. Don't worry about 'explaining' women's fertility cycles to women.
    To be blunt, if women don't start having children earlier, we're all going to die out in this country. That's what Goodwin is saying.
    It isn't quite that bad, age of mother at first birth is now 32 in the UK but it would be good to reduce that down closer towards 25

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/01/most-british-women-wait-until-32-to-have-first-child/
    Chaps, chaps, I know sex education wasn’t so scientifically comprehensive back in the 80s, but you do surely remember that having a baby involves two people, a man and a woman.

    The man has to bear the terrible burden of having a shag and ejaculating. The woman has the simple task of carrying a baby to term then popping it out and putting her career on hold.

    So perhaps making this all about what women should be doing is not the entirety of the story?
    100 years ago most women did not have careers, the father did. Even 50 years ago most women gave up their jobs once they became mothers or at most went part time, only top high flying women like Thatcher who could afford nannies continued working full time after motherhood and of course Dennis was a high earning businessman as well.
    That's not quite true: women worked until they had children. Unless they were poor (which most people were), in which case they worked even when they had children.

    Who do you think were the cooks and cleaners in 1926 Britain? Who do you think worked in the textile factories? Or were secretaries in offices? Who were the nurses? Or the primary school teachers?
    My aunt had to give up her job at a bank in 1950s when she got married. Not because her husband wanted her to but because that was the bank rule.
    My mum was a manageress in a shoe shop. When she married she had to resign because married women couldn't hold that position. So she became a housewife and had 4 kids. That then fixed her identity for life. Wife and mother. People find ways of being happy, and I hope/think she did, but nostalgia for those old ways is misplaced imo.
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