Don is just wrong on this, but right on CLP nominations. There were 129 votes cast at our nomination meeting out of a total membership in excess of 1,100. Corbyn won.
What Don ignores is the biggest indicator of all: the CLP NEC vote in which the Corbyn slate won every seat. What's more, the least supported Corbyn candidate won around 30,000 more votes than the best supported non-Corbyn candidate. If Smith can keep the margin to 60-40 he will have done well.
That said, I think the leadership campaign has not been great for JC: 1. Despite the CLP votes he does not have guaranteed NEC control. That will make changing party rules challenging. 2. Moderate union leaders have been very pointed in their observations about the need for unity and they are looking at JC. 3. Lies about polling performance and EU referendum engagement have been exposed. 4. Corbyn's lack of leadership, unwillingness to compromise and remoteness have been made clear. 5. His lack of policies has become apparent, as has his disdain for Parliament. 6. Corbyn's comfort zone preaching to the converted campaigning style and inability to debate have become issues. 7. Entryism is now a big issue, alongside anti-semitism
Despite my harsh words about them, I do believe that most Corbynistas are genuine Labour supporters who want Labour to win. This campaign has, I think, given them plenty of food for thought. I think a lot of them will be voting to give JC one more chance more than anything else. They're annoyed at the PLP (unfairly in my view, but they are) and less than convinced by Smith, but JC is not the messiah. How he reacts to his victory will be key to his survival. I am sure that a majority of Labour members now believe he has to substantially up his game.
Plus 8. Both sides in this entire sorry affair have laid bare their abject inability to organise or manage anything, which is hardly a great position for people seeking election to run the country.
Is Coventry not the raid that they knew was coming but did nothing about because that would have disclosed that they had broken Enigma?
I believe that to be a myth, there are lot of things that were said to have been allowed to happen to protect Ultra, and in most cases it is a retrospective explanation for failure not a direct cause that has been revealed.
At that stage of the war we were still figuring out German navigation systems and how to counter them, we also had a very incomplete picture of German deployments in occupied Europe at that time. SOE only became active in July 1940, and many early attempts to infiltrate agents were failures, useful intelligence networks didn't develop until much later and many of them were compromised or destroyed. Aerial photographic reconnaissance was also very patchy in 1940. Even where we had signals intelligence (a decrypted message) it doesn't mean we always knew what it meant as you would still need to know what things like code words referred to and the order of battle. We got it wrong many more times than people recall.
We remember our painful failures and look for easy explanations, but forget the successes and the price we paid to achieve them. How can you even measure the value of something you prevent?
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
Mr. Topping, not sure it would legitimise them [Hitler's policies were hardly legitimate, in the moral sense].
However, I do agree we need to either treat this as a modern sort of war, or widespread criminality. Having a war-like approach to not reporting stuff fully without taking a corresponding approach elsewhere (treating Islamists as traitors or enemy combatants) is a mishmash.
I think that's absolutely right. And I think either approach (war or criminality) has its merits. Not deciding is dumb.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is my all time favourite computer geek movie
The true importance of Turing is he proved the general purpose programmable nature of a computing device. This contribution will be remembered long after the Enigma thing (important as it was) has all but become forgotten to history.
Don is just wrong on this, but right on CLP nominations. There were 129 votes cast at our nomination meeting out of a total membership in excess of 1,100. Corbyn won.
What Don ignores is the biggest indicator of all: the CLP NEC vote in which the Corbyn slate won every seat. What's more, the least supported Corbyn candidate won around 30,000 more votes than the best supported non-Corbyn candidate. If Smith can keep the margin to 60-40 he will have done well.
That said, I think the leadership campaign has not been great for JC: 1. Despite the CLP votes he does not have guaranteed NEC control. That will make changing party rules challenging. 2. Moderate union leaders have been very pointed in their observations about the need for unity and they are looking at JC. 3. Lies about polling performance and EU referendum engagement have been exposed. 4. Corbyn's lack of leadership, unwillingness to compromise and remoteness have been made clear. 5. His lack of policies has become apparent, as has his disdain for Parliament. 6. Corbyn's comfort zone preaching to the converted campaigning style and inability to debate have become issues. 7. Entryism is now a big issue, alongside anti-semitism
Despite my harsh words about them, I do believe that most Corbynistas are genuine Labour supporters who want Labour to win. This campaign has, I think, given them plenty of food for thought. I think a lot of them will be voting to give JC one more chance more than anything else. They're annoyed at the PLP (unfairly in my view, but they are) and less than convinced by Smith, but JC is not the messiah. How he reacts to his victory will be key to his survival. I am sure that a majority of Labour members now believe he has to substantially up his game.
up his game? After so many years on the barricades?
Apart from anything else, upping his game = rowing back on any number of long-held beliefs and tacking to the centre.
Can you really see him doing that?
Best of luck to them all. Meanwhile the Tories will continue to rule uninterrupted except for their own squabbles over who owns policy.
“Now we are being told,” he continued, “that if Labour returns to socialism it won’t win an election. So what? We should stand for a principle, win or lose. What’s the point of winning elections if we can’t implement what we believe in? In that case what is Labour for, apart from advancing a few careers? I want to be able to vote for what I believe, whether it wins elections or not. If Labour won’t promote its principles, I have no voice. All the parties represent the same programme. I have no one to vote for. I am disfranchised.”
That was the point where his complaint became identical to that of a UKIP supporter. That is not a flippant point: disfranchisement is the crucial issue that has provoked the present crisis in British politics and which could yet trigger a dramatic revolution in the political system, even beyond what it has already effected...
Mr. Topping, not sure it would legitimise them [Hitler's policies were hardly legitimate, in the moral sense].
However, I do agree we need to either treat this as a modern sort of war, or widespread criminality. Having a war-like approach to not reporting stuff fully without taking a corresponding approach elsewhere (treating Islamists as traitors or enemy combatants) is a mishmash.
I think that's absolutely right. And I think either approach (war or criminality) has its merits. Not deciding is dumb.
War would be politically unacceptable, impractical, and likely counter-productive.
Don is just wrong on this, but right on CLP nominations. There were 129 votes cast at our nomination meeting out of a total membership in excess of 1,100. Corbyn won.
What Don ignores is the biggest indicator of all: the CLP NEC vote in which the Corbyn slate won every seat. What's more, the least supported Corbyn candidate won around 30,000 more votes than the best supported non-Corbyn candidate. If Smith can keep the margin to 60-40 he will have done well.
That said, I think the leadership campaign has not been great for JC: 1. Despite the CLP votes he does not have guaranteed NEC control. That will make changing party rules challenging. 2. Moderate union leaders have been very pointed in their observations about the need for unity and they are looking at JC. 3. Lies about polling performance and EU referendum engagement have been exposed. 4. Corbyn's lack of leadership, unwillingness to compromise and remoteness have been made clear. 5. His lack of policies has become apparent, as has his disdain for Parliament. 6. Corbyn's comfort zone preaching to the converted campaigning style and inability to debate have become issues. 7. Entryism is now a big issue, alongside anti-semitism
Despite my harsh words about them, I do believe that most Corbynistas are genuine Labour supporters who want Labour to win. This campaign has, I think, given them plenty of food for thought. I think a lot of them will be voting to give JC one more chance more than anything else. They're annoyed at the PLP (unfairly in my view, but they are) and less than convinced by Smith, but JC is not the messiah. How he reacts to his victory will be key to his survival. I am sure that a majority of Labour members now believe he has to substantially up his game.
up his game? After so many years on the barricades?
Apart from anything else, upping his game = rowing back on any number of long-held beliefs and tacking to the centre.
Can you really see him doing that?
Best of luck to them all. Meanwhile the Tories will continue to rule uninterrupted except for their own squabbles over who owns policy.
Well exactly. Lab is now in a classic I wouldn't have started from here situation.
Don is just wrong on this, but right on CLP nominations. There were 129 votes cast at our nomination meeting out of a total membership in excess of 1,100. Corbyn won.
What Don ignores is the biggest indicator of all: the CLP NEC vote in which the Corbyn slate won every seat. What's more, the least supported Corbyn candidate won around 30,000 more votes than the best supported non-Corbyn candidate. If Smith can keep the margin to 60-40 he will have done well.
That said, I think the leadership campaign has not been great for JC: 1. Despite the CLP votes he does not have guaranteed NEC control. That will make changing party rules challenging. 2. Moderate union leaders have been very pointed in their observations about the need for unity and they are looking at JC. 3. Lies about polling performance and EU referendum engagement have been exposed. 4. Corbyn's lack of leadership, unwillingness to compromise and remoteness have been made clear. 5. His lack of policies has become apparent, as has his disdain for Parliament. 6. Corbyn's comfort zone preaching to the converted campaigning style and inability to debate have become issues. 7. Entryism is now a big issue, alongside anti-semitism
Despite my harsh words about them, I do believe that most Corbynistas are genuine Labour supporters who want Labour to win. This campaign has, I think, given them plenty of food for thought. I think a lot of them will be voting to give JC one more chance more than anything else. They're annoyed at the PLP (unfairly in my view, but they are) and less than convinced by Smith, but JC is not the messiah. How he reacts to his victory will be key to his survival. I am sure that a majority of Labour members now believe he has to substantially up his game.
up his game? After so many years on the barricades?
Apart from anything else, upping his game = rowing back on any number of long-held beliefs and tacking to the centre.
Can you really see him doing that?
Nope. That's why I am not too despondent that he's going to win. I think the campaign is defining the parameters under which Corbyn will be judged and that he has no hope of delivering. Long term that's good for Labour, though it does mean we gift the 2020 GE to a government that in the normal course of events would be eminently beatable.
"Hundreds of British teenage girls are still keen on joining Islamic State (Isis) despite the death of a London schoolgirl in Syria, according to counter-radicalisation experts, raising fresh doubts about the effectiveness of the government’s strategy to combat radicalism."
Is Coventry not the raid that they knew was coming but did nothing about because that would have disclosed that they had broken Enigma?
I believe that to be a myth, there are lot of things that were said to have been allowed to happen to protect Ultra, and in most cases it is a retrospective explanation for failure not a direct cause that has been revealed.
At that stage of the war we were still figuring out German navigation systems and how to counter them, we also had a very incomplete picture of German deployments in occupied Europe at that time. SOE only became active in July 1940, and many early attempts to infiltrate agents were failures, useful intelligence networks didn't develop until much later and many of them were compromised or destroyed. Aerial photographic reconnaissance was also very patchy in 1940. Even where we had signals intelligence (a decrypted message) it doesn't mean we always knew what it meant as you would still need to know what things like code words referred to and the order of battle. We got it wrong many more times than people recall.
We remember our painful failures and look for easy explanations, but forget the successes and the price we paid to achieve them. How can you even measure the value of something you prevent?
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
There was a series on BBC-tv not long ago about The Somme which suggested that German Intelligence was much better than the British, and much better than the British realised.
The true importance of Turing is he proved the general purpose programmable nature of a computing device. This contribution will be remembered long after the Enigma thing (important as it was) has all but become forgotten to history.
Miss Plato, in a world where Superman costumes need a label stating wearing it does not enable one to fly, there is a limit to what can be done in the fight against epic stupidity.
Don is just wrong on this, but right on CLP nominations. There were 129 votes cast at our nomination meeting out of a total membership in excess of 1,100. Corbyn won.
What Don ignores is the biggest indicator of all: the CLP NEC vote in which the Corbyn slate won every seat. What's more, the least supported Corbyn candidate won around 30,000 more votes than the best supported non-Corbyn candidate. If Smith can keep the margin to 60-40 he will have done well.
That said, I think the leadership campaign has not been great for JC: 1. Despite the CLP votes he does not have guaranteed NEC control. That will make changing party rules challenging. 2. Moderate union leaders have been very pointed in their observations about the need for unity and they are looking at JC. 3. Lies about polling performance and EU referendum engagement have been exposed. 4. Corbyn's lack of leadership, unwillingness to compromise and remoteness have been made clear. 5. His lack of policies has become apparent, as has his disdain for Parliament. 6. Corbyn's comfort zone preaching to the converted campaigning style and inability to debate have become issues. 7. Entryism is now a big issue, alongside anti-semitism
Despite my harsh words about them, I do believe that most Corbynistas are genuine Labour supporters who want Labour to win. This campaign has, I think, given them plenty of food for thought. I think a lot of them will be voting to give JC one more chance more than anything else. They're annoyed at the PLP (unfairly in my view, but they are) and less than convinced by Smith, but JC is not the messiah. How he reacts to his victory will be key to his survival. I am sure that a majority of Labour members now believe he has to substantially up his game.
up his game? After so many years on the barricades?
Apart from anything else, upping his game = rowing back on any number of long-held beliefs and tacking to the centre.
Can you really see him doing that?
Nope. That's why I am not too despondent that he's going to win. I think the campaign is defining the parameters under which Corbyn will be judged and that he has no hope of delivering. Long term that's good for Labour, though it does mean we gift the 2020 GE to a government that in the normal course of events would be eminently beatable.
One potential option is that once McCluskey has been reelected (2017 I think) by his hard left activist base, he will pivot and tell Corbyn that actually, on reflection, he is crap and it is time to go. Giving a new leader a nice run up until 2020.
Incidentally, cheers to whoever mentioned Brian Blessed's autobiography. Good idea for a present, I think.
On a similar line I've recently read David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon, and Bring on the Empty Horses. The first book was particularly amusing and interesting, and I would think a person who enjoyed reading about Brian Blessed's life and career would find it enjoyable.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
There was a Horizon programme about Colossus iirc. It is probably on Youtube but while looking for it, I found this documentary (and related links) so that is another two hours wasted this afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".
Even before Enigma was broken, a lot of intelligence was mined simply from what we'd now call metadata -- who was talking to whom. This is what the spooks want from mobile phones.
Note that those comparative stats are based on health and care spend. This includes in the UK both NHS plus local authority spend on the care system. This is the major increase in % spend rather than private health.
Thank you. The reason I've used these figures is that, as far as I can tell from the ONS source document, these are the OECD countries using the SHA 2011 definitions, so it's as close to an apples to apples comparison as I'm able to get using open source data.
The true importance of Turing is he proved the general purpose programmable nature of a computing device. This contribution will be remembered long after the Enigma thing (important as it was) has all but become forgotten to history.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
There was a Horizon programme about Colossus iirc. It is probably on Youtube but while looking for it, I found this documentary (and related links) so that is another two hours wasted this afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".
Even before Enigma was broken, a lot of intelligence was mined simply from what we'd now call metadata -- who was talking to whom. This is what the spooks want from mobile phones.
There are all manner of unsung heroes. We rather unfairly tend to discount the Polish work that gave us a head start on tackling Enigma.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
There was a Horizon programme about Colossus iirc. It is probably on Youtube but while looking for it, I found this documentary (and related links) so that is another two hours wasted this afternoon. ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g .
Damn you, some of us are already struggling to work with the Olympics on, and now posting videos of Colossus to take up what's remaining of the afternoon! Grr...
I believe that to be a myth, there are lot of things that were said to have been allowed to happen to protect Ultra, and in most cases it is a retrospective explanation for failure not a direct cause that has been revealed.
At that stage of the war we were still figuring out German navigation systems and how to counter them, we also had a very incomplete picture of German deployments in occupied Europe at that time. SOE only became active in July 1940, and many early attempts to infiltrate agents were failures, useful intelligence networks didn't develop until much later and many of them were compromised or destroyed. Aerial photographic reconnaissance was also very patchy in 1940. Even where we had signals intelligence (a decrypted message) it doesn't mean we always knew what it meant as you would still need to know what things like code words referred to and the order of battle. We got it wrong many more times than people recall.
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
There was a series on BBC-tv not long ago about The Somme which suggested that German Intelligence was much better than the British, and much better than the British realised.
In WWI, that may well be true. In WWII, it wasn't. Getting intelligence right was one thing the UK did well. Generally speaking, it's one thing that smaller and weaker powers are obliged to get right because winning with raw power isn't possible.
During war there are serious reporting restrictions. If we're going to have the same now then perhaps we could have some of the other measures that are taken during wartime against those who are or may be a threat.
There may be a case for not spreading the details of attacks far and wide in minute detail to deter copycat terrorists. And if that is effective then I can see its value. But I worry that the reason for clamping down on information about attacks is less to do with operational effectiveness and more about turning a blind eye to what is happening, who is doing them and why. That is not good. There is already a loss of trust in our politicians and a feeling that too many of them are doing everything they can to avoid identifying the source of the problems. Anything which continues that is I think dangerous.
Before you can even think of finding a solution (or a range of them) you need to have a clear sighted analysis of what the problem is. We do not have that from too many in the political/media establishment. That is a bar to clear thought. And into that vacuum all sorts of nasties will be prone to rush.
Eh? We've been (as in the media and politicians) have been saying for years what the problem is, delete as appropriate: Isis/Alqaeda/Islamist terror/Islamism/Jihadists.
I think we're pretty clear what the problem is, we just don't know what to do about it ! I do but they don't.
I'm not sure I agree that we are clear about the problem. To my mind we have not understood the problems caused to social cohesion, without which a society cannot effectively function (other than with a degree of authoritarianism and coercion largely unacceptable to the Western world) by having a significant minority in a society which does not share or believe in the fundamental norms at the heart of Western civilization. There risks being an irreconcilable tension between the two and terrorism is one manifestation of that tension. Even if the terrorism ceased, that tension would still be there and would still cause problems. Too much of the focus is only on the terrorism and not this wider issue. That is why I say there is a lack of clear sightedness.
"Hundreds of British teenage girls are still keen on joining Islamic State (Isis) despite the death of a London schoolgirl in Syria, according to counter-radicalisation experts, raising fresh doubts about the effectiveness of the government’s strategy to combat radicalism."
Logic fail. Just because something isn't a magic bullet, it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
There were lots of absolutely vital people and projects. The Polish cryptographers who got the ball rolling, radio interception was a huge project, Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Tiltman, thousands of people doing the legwork. And that's only the production side, the people on the consumption side in the various military and intelligence agencies who interpreted and made use of the product were vital too.
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
There was a series on BBC-tv not long ago about The Somme which suggested that German Intelligence was much better than the British, and much better than the British realised.
In WWI, that may well be true. In WWII, it wasn't. Getting intelligence right was one thing the UK did well. Generally speaking, it's one thing that smaller and weaker powers are obliged to get right because winning with raw power isn't possible.
Surely, if German intelligence and code-breaking had been much cop, D-Day would have been a fiasco?
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war". ...
The late Mr. Good was of course entitled to his opinion, but the facts don't fit. Homosexuality was not exactly unknown at the time and there were plenty of people in positions of power and influence whose sexual tastes were known by the authorities.
Turing was a very clever mathematician but the idea that we would have lost the war without him is hyperbole of the biggest order. His contribution to the work of Bletchley Park, must not be underestimated, but neither should it be exaggerated. There were lots of other people who contributed more to the Ultra system.
During war there are serious reporting restrictions. If we're going to have the same now then perhaps we could have some of the other measures that are taken during wartime against those who are or may be a threat.
There may be a case for not spreading the details of attacks far and wide in minute detail to deter copycat terrorists. And if that is effective then I can see its value. But I worry that the reason for clamping down on information about attacks is less to do with operational effectiveness and more about turning a blind eye to what is happening, who is doing them and why. That is not good. There is already a loss of trust in our politicians and a feeling that too many of them are doing everything they can to avoid identifying the source of the problems. Anything which continues that is I think dangerous.
Before you can even think of finding a solution (or a range of them) you need to have a clear sighted analysis of what the problem is. We do not have that from too many in the political/media establishment. That is a bar to clear thought. And into that vacuum all sorts of nasties will be prone to rush.
Eh? We've been (as in the media and politicians) have been saying for years what the problem is, delete as appropriate: Isis/Alqaeda/Islamist terror/Islamism/Jihadists.
I think we're pretty clear what the problem is, we just don't know what to do about it ! I do but they don't.
I'm not sure I agree that we are clear about the problem. To my mind we have not understood the problems caused to social cohesion, without which a society cannot effectively function (other than with a degree of authoritarianism and coercion largely unacceptable to the Western world) by having a significant minority in a society which does not share or believe in the fundamental norms at the heart of Western civilization. There risks being an irreconcilable tension between the two and terrorism is one manifestation of that tension. Even if the terrorism ceased, that tension would still be there and would still cause problems. Too much of the focus is only on the terrorism and not this wider issue. That is why I say there is a lack of clear sightedness.
The only way to square that circle is to ask practising Muslims to leave because they don't fit in with the majority values.
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
There was a series on BBC-tv not long ago about The Somme which suggested that German Intelligence was much better than the British, and much better than the British realised.
In WWI, that may well be true. In WWII, it wasn't. Getting intelligence right was one thing the UK did well. Generally speaking, it's one thing that smaller and weaker powers are obliged to get right because winning with raw power isn't possible.
Surely, if German intelligence and code-breaking had been much cop, D-Day would have been a fiasco?
The Germans were very effective at breaking the Allied merchant shipping codes, which contributed heavily to their successes in the Atlantic in '42-43. Their HUMINT was, by and large, dire.
Is Coventry not the raid that they knew was coming but did nothing about because that would have disclosed that they had broken Enigma?
SOE only became active in July 1940, and many early attempts to infiltrate agents were failures, useful intelligence networks didn't develop until much later and many of them were compromised or destroyed. Aerial photographic reconnaissance was also very patchy in 1940. Even where we had signals intelligence (a decrypted message) it doesn't mean we always knew what it meant as you would still need to know what things like code words referred to and the order of battle. We got it wrong many more times than people recall.
We remember our painful failures and look for easy explanations, but forget the successes and the price we paid to achieve them. How can you even measure the value of something you prevent?
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
The German cypher was essentially secure. It was nearly always either human laziness or physically captured information which allowed it to be cracked.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
Mr. Eagles, surely Mayans is the only acceptable answer?
Miss Cyclefree, a very good point. If this is a war (or comparable situation) then have those who wish to fight against British forces charged with treason, and those who wish to join ISIS/Daesh locked up.
As with Op Banner, the UK Govt is very keen to portray IS-related behaviour as criminality rather than a war. To say it is a war would be to say we have a coherent enemy with coherent aims and would also, thereby, legitimise those aims.
IS do have very coherent aims in their terms. Unless we take the trouble to understand our enemy I don't see how we can really be successful in defeating them. That does not mean legitimizing them. There is a danger in believing what we want to be true rather than forming our opinion on the facts, unpalatable as those facts may be. IS people may well be criminals but they - and the people behind them - have an ideological/political purpose and ignoring that is foolish. That ideological/political purpose has to be undermined and fought (a battle of ideas) in just the same way as we take straightforward criminal/security measures.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
They're not just playing by different rules, they're playing a different game. That was shown when they seemed assured no-one would stick around after so decisively having lost control of their MPs, and he barely seemed to hesitate.
And for all I think they will mostly go quiet when Corbyn beats Smith - it's simply too hard and too painful for most to consider breaking away or continuing too much resistance - I do think some Corbynites like NIckP are underplaying how serious the divisions would impact the party even if most of the MPs agree to play ball.
They didn't step up and say he had the wrong ideas (some did, but not most), they stepped up and said they were good ideas but he was terrible. Him winning a leadership election doesn't change that they said and believed that, so everyone will know a majority of the MPs will think he isn't up to it even if they don't say it, and that they will be lying if they say they do think he's up to it, since what occurred to make them now think he was up to it? Winning the leadership wouldn't do it, since his ability to win that was already known as possible.
Now, you can get away with lying about divisions, Blair and Brown getting along just fine being an example, but it's not helpful.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
My issue with Corbynites is that I find them incomprehensible. I can understand Remain voters; their concerns are perfectly valid and logical. The Jezza worshippers might just as well be aliens or pixies. Hence they're unpredictable.
The closest historical analogies I can think of are the millennial cults, or the Xhosa people killing all their cattle in order to expel the white man.
It is curious how little focus there has been on whether Owen Smith would be be any good as Labour leader. I appreciate I'm not the target market, but I find it hard to believe he would. Of course, the hope of the AnyoneBut Corbyn faction is that choosing Anyone But Corbyn would reverse or at least halt the entryist takeover of the party, but even that seems a bit optimistic, given the NEC makeup.
It'll be pretty easy to keep the pesky membership away from power without the leadership to back them up. If Corbyn is gone, then the NEC will be fairly solidly "mainstream". Hard Left candidates in future elections will be blocked from standing by the MPs, and very possibly the old college system will be recreated too.
There might be some sharp fights for candidate selection, but wholesale reselection isn't going to be practical without support from the top.
It'll probably be the "soft left" in the driving seat rather than the "moderates", but if the hard left lose the leadership they're pretty much sunk.
Note that those comparative stats are based on health and care spend. This includes in the UK both NHS plus local authority spend on the care system. This is the major increase in % spend rather than private health.
Thank you. The reason I've used these figures is that, as far as I can tell from the ONS source document, these are the OECD countries using the SHA 2011 definitions, so it's as close to an apples to apples comparison as I'm able to get using open source data.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
My issue with Corbynites is that I find them incomprehensible. I can understand Remain voters; their concerns are perfectly valid and logical. The Jezza worshippers might just as well be aliens or pixies. Hence they're unpredictable.
The closest historical analogies I can think of are the millennial cults, or the Xhosa people killing all their cattle in order to expel the white man.
I can sort of see where they are coming from. I can see that plenty of 1980s lefties who remember being a student under Thatcher have waited their whole adult lives for a moment like this and I can see how a young student thinks the promised land of nationalised industry all sounds wonderfully refreshing and different. I can even sort of just about see how all this might blind them to the idea that you have to win in the marginals to win power (the youngsters probably don't even know what a marginal is).
But I just can't understand why they think JC is the person to lead them to the promised land.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Unless they can run the "betrayal" argument, which I expect some will. Easy to claim that you would have won had you not been betrayed by [insert suitable candidates here]. That's a meme that can run and run. The ideas behind Corbynism need to have been utterly discredited. What we don't need is those same ideas presented with a slightly more presentable / competent face.
You will see that they seem to come down on Churchill having at best partial information. My concern would be that these opinions were mainly expressed before the full scale of Bletchley Park's success was generally appreciated.
The Imitation Game was a terrible film but well-made. Its writer seemed not to have understood his source material. Turing et al did not decide what would be done with the decrypts (and the next steps would be to translate them into English and then into intelligence).
German bombers followed radio beams for navigation.
However, the main thing that Ultra hid was that for much of the war, the Germans were reading and deciphering British transmissions. At this distance, it is puzzling we did not think of this at the time. Later, we developed Type X machines, which were basically Enigma with the flaws removed.
It was an interrsting form of psycosis suffered by both sides that thought their own cyphers secure whilst breaking their opponents.
There was a series on BBC-tv not long ago about The Somme which suggested that German Intelligence was much better than the British, and much better than the British realised.
In WWI, that may well be true. In WWII, it wasn't. Getting intelligence right was one thing the UK did well. Generally speaking, it's one thing that smaller and weaker powers are obliged to get right because winning with raw power isn't possible.
Surely, if German intelligence and code-breaking had been much cop, D-Day would have been a fiasco?
Indeed. D-Day might well have marked the low-point of the German intelligence capability. Sure, the Allies engaged in a huge amount of deception and the invasion itself came in conditions that the Germans thought so poor as to preclude an invasion (which was close to true but complacent all the same; Rommel disappeared off to Paris to buy shoes for his wife), but that the Germans were still debating whether the Normandy landings were a feint or the main strike several days after they took place is an excellent indication that they didn't have a clue what was going on, other than from their own reports on the ground.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
Well, the losing bit can certainly be arranged. Make sure they are all propped up in front of the telly for the exit poll at 10pm on 7th May 2020.
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war". ...
The late Mr. Good was of course entitled to his opinion, but the facts don't fit. Homosexuality was not exactly unknown at the time and there were plenty of people in positions of power and influence whose sexual tastes were known by the authorities.
Turing was a very clever mathematician but the idea that we would have lost the war without him is hyperbole of the biggest order. His contribution to the work of Bletchley Park, must not be underestimated, but neither should it be exaggerated. There were lots of other people who contributed more to the Ultra system.
Really?!
There were certainly lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system but were there really lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system more?
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
My issue with Corbynites is that I find them incomprehensible. I can understand Remain voters; their concerns are perfectly valid and logical. The Jezza worshippers might just as well be aliens or pixies. Hence they're unpredictable.
The closest historical analogies I can think of are the millennial cults, or the Xhosa people killing all their cattle in order to expel the white man.
I can sort of see where they are coming from. I can see that plenty of 1980s lefties who remember being a student under Thatcher have waited their whole adult lives for a moment like this and I can see how a young student thinks the promised land of nationalised industry all sounds wonderfully refreshing and different. I can even sort of just about see how all this might blind them to the idea that you have to win in the marginals to win power (the youngsters probably don't even know what a marginal is).
But I just can't understand why they think JC is the person to lead them to the promised land.
The issue I have with the general 'omg it's all a disaster' - no matter on what topic, is that this country has experienced a golden age in my lifetime. I am 222 quarters old (bear with me!). The UK has had economic growth for 200 of those, including a record-breaking 60 quarter run in the 90s.
Ultimately, that is Labour's problem. Things aren't perfect, but to the voters (i.e. people my age and older) they've been a hell of a lot worse. Apocalyptic rhetoric from Labour just isn't credible.
For example, the NHS is 71 years old. The Tories have been in power for 41 of those, 54 if you count Blair. It's still struggling on in its eternal crisis. No one wants to privatise it or destroy it, yet here's Owen ranting on about it today.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
This generation of hipsters will get a job, grow up and move on.
There is no generation that the next generation will be Corbynites, they could just as equally view Corbynism as part of the establishment by then and seek an alternative to displace the Tories.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
There was a Horizon programme about Colossus iirc. It is probably on Youtube but while looking for it, I found this documentary (and related links) so that is another two hours wasted this afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".
Even before Enigma was broken, a lot of intelligence was mined simply from what we'd now call metadata -- who was talking to whom. This is what the spooks want from mobile phones.
There are all manner of unsung heroes. We rather unfairly tend to discount the Polish work that gave us a head start on tackling Enigma.
Up to a point. The Polish work is quite well known now, and was why the BP machines were called bombes, after the Polish bomba. It is a bit like documentaries on Turing would start with his being unknown even though by then he was almost as famous as David Beckham. Incidentally, Turing's banburismus technique, which was based on the Polish work, at BP was only recently declassified.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I suggested Mayflowers as a deliberate corruption of May-followers.
I posted a whole list of suggestions a while back. My fave was Maynards.
We'd a Maynard's sweetie shop across the road - what a marvellous place. Acres of shelf space brimming with bottles of sherbet, cola cubes, bullets, squashy mint cremes... And a special glass case just for fresh liquorice fancies.
In the Imitation Game there is reference to an algorithm being used to determine what could be acted upon and what could not. No idea how that worked in practice.
I haven't actually seen that film, but it is quite widely regarded as being a load of tosh from a historical perspective. Turing's role is important, but there were thousands of people working on Ultra, which covered a lot more than Enigma, and many other contributions were at least as valuable as Turing's. Turing's suicide and homosexuality make his story "sexy", you are not going to see a blockbuster film about say Tommy Flowers's work on Colossus to break the probably more important Lorenz cipher machines used by the German High Command to communicate with the Army command. That would be a geeks only film.
There was a Horizon programme about Colossus iirc. It is probably on Youtube but while looking for it, I found this documentary (and related links) so that is another two hours wasted this afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".
Even before Enigma was broken, a lot of intelligence was mined simply from what we'd now call metadata -- who was talking to whom. This is what the spooks want from mobile phones.
There are all manner of unsung heroes. We rather unfairly tend to discount the Polish work that gave us a head start on tackling Enigma.
Up to a point. The Polish work is quite well known now, and was why the BP machines were called bombes, after the Polish bomba. It is a bit like documentaries on Turing would start with his being unknown even though by then he was almost as famous as David Beckham. Incidentally, Turing's banburismus technique, which was based on the Polish work, at BP was only recently declassified.
For anyone interested in WWII intelligence viewed as a whole, rather than from the UK-centric viewpoint which we usually get, Max Hastings' The Secret War is a spiffing read:
It's a bit disjointed, but that's probably inevitable given the nature of the subject. Overall, though, it's excellent in describing what our allies and our enemies were up to.
Indeed. D-Day might well have marked the low-point of the German intelligence capability. Sure, the Allies engaged in a huge amount of deception and the invasion itself came in conditions that the Germans thought so poor as to preclude an invasion (which was close to true but complacent all the same; Rommel disappeared off to Paris to buy shoes for his wife), but that the Germans were still debating whether the Normandy landings were a feint or the main strike several days after they took place is an excellent indication that they didn't have a clue what was going on, other than from their own reports on the ground.
Not to mention that SOE and the French Resistance had done an excellent job of sabotaging the railways so the Germans could not easily move troops and tanks to where the fighting was.
During war there are serious reporting restrictions. ... There may be a case for not spreading the details of attacks far and wide in minute detail to deter copycat terrorists. And if that is effective then I can see its value. But I worry that the reason for clamping down on information about attacks is less to do with operational effectiveness and more about turning a blind eye to wh.... Before you can even think of finding a solution (or a range of them) you need to have a clear sighted analysis of w.........
Eh? We've been (as in the media and politicians) have been saying for years what the problem is, delete as appropriate: Isis/Alqaeda/Islamist terror/Islamism/Jihadists. I think we're pretty clear what the problem is, we just don't know what to do about it ! I do but they don't.
I'm not sure I agree that we are clear about the problem. To my mind we have not understood the problems caused to social cohesion, without which a society cannot effectively function (other than with a degree of authoritarianism and coercion largely unacceptable to the Western world) by having a significant minority in a society which does not share or believe in the fundamental norms at the heart of Western civilization. There risks being an irreconcilable tension between the two and terrorism is one manifestation of that tension. Even if the terrorism ceased, that tension would still be there and would still cause problems. Too much of the focus is only on the terrorism and not this wider issue. That is why I say there is a lack of clear sightedness.
We know what the problems of social cohesion are with the muslim community, these are self evident and will inevitably lead to problems where the vulnerable group, the young, come into contact with muslim fundamentalism.
1. The main people going off to work with/in ISIS are young. They are very rarely middle aged or older. 2. Key focus has to be on who are the influencers on young muslims? Some clearly in this country are in plain sight amongst the islamic education establishments and networks. Some outside the country are communicating through the internet and social networks.
Rooting out the bad influencers that are in this country, is essential and I would have thought the easiest to trace and monitor.
Monitoring those who "tune into" the fundamentalists via communications networks, would to my eyes not be the hardest job once insight is created into the main poisonous channels and these are treated as a "dark side of the internet" and all who look there have their contacts monitored.
For anyone interested in WWII intelligence viewed as a whole, rather than from the UK-centric viewpoint which we usually get, Max Hastings' The Secret War is a spiffing read:
It's a bit disjointed, but that's probably inevitable given the nature of the subject. Overall, though, it's excellent in describing what our allies and our enemies were up to.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
It was obvious that if the Labour MPs want to defeat Corbyn, they needed a unity candidate to all support.
Steven Shephard looks at whether it's possible that Trump can buck the sixteen straight election trend that a candidate leading post convention will win the popular vote in November :
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
It was obvious that if the Labour MPs want to defeat Corbyn, they needed a unity candidate to all support.
Note that those comparative stats are based on health and care spend. This includes in the UK both NHS plus local authority spend on the care system. This is the major increase in % spend rather than private health.
Thank you. The reason I've used these figures is that, as far as I can tell from the ONS source document, these are the OECD countries using the SHA 2011 definitions, so it's as close to an apples to apples comparison as I'm able to get using open source data.
That's a good article, and a starting point for the analysis that needs to happen about what health and social care will look like 10/20/30 years from now.
There's a good opportunity here for the government to use the lack of serious opposition to its advantage. There's loads of things that have been on the too-difficult list since Major and Blair's time for lack of political will in the face of the need for change.
Blair in particular had two massive majorities but failed to be radical enough. The minimum wage was a good example of what he did achieve in his first term, but that's balanced by the devolution cockup - which very nearly broke the Union a decade and a half later. Maybe May can cement her legacy early on with the same radical thinking as another woman did in the same position.
Oh, and build the damn Heathrow runway. And another one while we've got the diggers out!
@georgeeaton: Some Labour MPs genuinely more optimistic about Smith's chances than CLP nominations suggest. Not just spinning.
@georgeeaton: On CLP nominations: "Not accurate reflection of wider membership. Many quiet, moderate members don't attend".
Is George Eaton profitable to follow on Labour matters ?
Yes, he's very good, usually offers a very calm analysis.
I remember last year, when it was looking like Corbyn was going to win, I think team Burnham or Cooper said their private polling showed them winning, he was very dismissive of their private polls.
Both he and Stephen Bush predicted Corbyn would win before most, and even before the polls showed he would.
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
It was obvious that if the Labour MPs want to defeat Corbyn, they needed a unity candidate to all support.
I have been out of the UK too long to have a sense of internal Labour politics. But from a distance, Benn would have seemed the obvious choice. It was his sacking that caused the rebellion in the cabinet and the no-confidence vote. And with his father, he has a pedigree ...
Genuine question - why did he not stand? If he could not win, why not?
Note that those comparative stats are based on health and care spend. This includes in the UK both NHS plus local authority spend on the care system. This is the major increase in % spend rather than private health.
Thank you. The reason I've used these figures is that, as far as I can tell from the ONS source document, these are the OECD countries using the SHA 2011 definitions, so it's as close to an apples to apples comparison as I'm able to get using open source data.
All good stuff. It does not deal with the problems caused by having people who think that sharia law should trump English law, for instance. That needs other solutions. Nunu's suggestion below is a step too far. But where there is a conflict between Islam and Western norms then Islam has to back down. Islam - certainly as a political ideology - finds it hard to do so. And we have not really thought hard enough about how to deal with that. Too often the reaction has been to seek accommodation, even at the cost of undermining our own values, or pretend that there is no conflict. That is untenable. A community which believes in a credal society cannot easily or happily co-exist in a society which believes in man-made laws and that religion is, in essence, a private matter. Those who believe the former and who live in the latter need to accept that their views cannot prevail, not even for themselves. In other words, we cannot have Muslims determining their family/criminal disputes according to sharia law since it is incompatible with English law. English law has to apply to all English citizens. We cannot have different laws for people based on their religion.
It is because we are not thinking properly about this potentially fundamental contradiction, because we have accepted the muddleheadedness behind multi-culturalism (as if it were merely about having exotic foods and brightly coloured clothes and different languages in our high streets) that we get a ludicrous focus on particular symbols (e.g. the burka or the burkini in France). They become the focus for a more general unease with what happens when you introduce into a society people with very different ideas who seem to be resistant to or unwilling to go along with the expected integration or who positively reject it. France has faced the brunt of this struggle. But all Western nations with a Muslim minority have the same issue, to a greater or lesser extent: us, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark. How we deal with this is one of the political issues of our time and will, I fear, continue to be so for some time to come.
I have been out of the UK too long to have a sense of internal Labour politics. But from a distance, Benn would have seemed the obvious choice. It was his sacking that caused the rebellion in the cabinet and the no-confidence vote. And with his father, he has a pedigree ...
Genuine question - why did he not stand? If he could not win, why not?
Corbynistas have a new mantra: "JC is forming the biggest political party in Europe".
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Parliament, what's that? They're trying to create a movement of workers and people to overthrow Tory scum on, err, Twitter.
The PLP are the Russians in Afghanistan. Their opponents are playing by different rules with different objectives. Corbyn doesn't need to win a general election. He does need control of the NEC. The boundary changes, plus GE20, will simply winnow out the disloyal 172.
It must be a race against time though. Sooner or later the young hipsters and students who think JC walks on water will realise that they have been had by a load of snake oil salesmen.
I very much doubt that. The young hipsters are beyond redemption IMO.
They'll move on. The whole point about being a hipster is to be hip. Trends change. It won't always be cool to be a Corbynista, especially after crushing electoral defeat.
Going against the grain is very valued by these people, being unpopular and losing is what they want. It's the same reason the Guardian makes no money while the Times does. They wear their unpopularity like a badge of honour.
There is certainly a bitterite tendency among the. Orbyn clan, but it's very small. Wide-eyed and credulous is much more typical. The GE defeat will drstroy many of them.
I actually think that defeat will make them bolder than before, they will blame the media, claim MI5 fixed the result and all manner of other theories but they won't even contemplate the bleeding obvious that their candidate is terrible and people are too sensible to vote for a party led by him. Labour are reaping what they have sowed, tbh and my sympathy is running lower and lower everyday. Especially since Smith is such a terrible candidate, he make Corbyn look half decent
I disagree. We'll find out, I guess.
did u see the comres poll that showed the tory party at -11 favourable/unfavourable (not good obvs.) and the Labour party at -20%? I'm quite young so I don't remember the last time that labour party were more unpopular than the Toariiiies.
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war". ...
The late Mr. Good was of course entitled to his opinion, but the facts don't fit. Homosexuality was not exactly unknown at the time and there were plenty of people in positions of power and influence whose sexual tastes were known by the authorities.
Turing was a very clever mathematician but the idea that we would have lost the war without him is hyperbole of the biggest order. His contribution to the work of Bletchley Park, must not be underestimated, but neither should it be exaggerated. There were lots of other people who contributed more to the Ultra system.
Really?!
There were certainly lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system but were there really lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system more?
Oh, yes, I think so. Do your own research, of course, but Turing's contribution was no where near as much as is nowadays made out. People do rather get confused between Turing's contribution to mathematics (which was huge) and his work in the war (which was far less significant).
Seems like they picked Smith because of the shift of the party to the left from top to bottom. They had to go with a candidate who was in similar political territory as Corbyn, someone that Corbyn backers might be willing to switch allegiance to.
With Labour where it is on the political spectrum right now a centre candidate or a Blairite wouldn't stand any chance.
Smith has only one job and that's removing Corbyn, once he's done that he's probably finished as well longer term. I don't see his political views as appealing to the electorate but he will have saved his party if he succeeds.
I have been out of the UK too long to have a sense of internal Labour politics. But from a distance, Benn would have seemed the obvious choice. It was his sacking that caused the rebellion in the cabinet and the no-confidence vote. And with his father, he has a pedigree ...
Genuine question - why did he not stand? If he could not win, why not?
Pedigree. Sounds so much better than nepotism.
But, being pedantic, it would only be nepotism if the father secured the position for him.
Comments
Mr. 1000, "Not deciding is dumb". Or 'Western policy towards terrorism', as it's also known [rather depressingly].
Criminalisation is the only option.
The French "Vladimir Poutine" is rather closer to the Russian than "Putin to rhyme with pew tin" that one hears a lot on the UK news.
"Hundreds of British teenage girls are still keen on joining Islamic State (Isis) despite the death of a London schoolgirl in Syria, according to counter-radicalisation experts, raising fresh doubts about the effectiveness of the government’s strategy to combat radicalism."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/15/man-dies-after-being-tasered-by-police/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcaHpvznC7g
Turing was absolutely vital though. The famous statistician Jack Good, who'd worked at BP, was asked about Turing being gay, and he answered along the lines of "luckily the security people never found out or they'd have sacked him and we might have lost the war".
Even before Enigma was broken, a lot of intelligence was mined simply from what we'd now call metadata -- who was talking to whom. This is what the spooks want from mobile phones.
http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf
Clinton 57 .. Trump 27
http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/08/clinton-trump-poll-augurs-poorly-for-nys-down-ballot-republicans-104715
It'll take some explaining then when they lose 100 seats at next GE.
Bring on the dancing horses......
Turing was a very clever mathematician but the idea that we would have lost the war without him is hyperbole of the biggest order. His contribution to the work of Bletchley Park, must not be underestimated, but neither should it be exaggerated. There were lots of other people who contributed more to the Ultra system.
And for all I think they will mostly go quiet when Corbyn beats Smith - it's simply too hard and too painful for most to consider breaking away or continuing too much resistance - I do think some Corbynites like NIckP are underplaying how serious the divisions would impact the party even if most of the MPs agree to play ball.
They didn't step up and say he had the wrong ideas (some did, but not most), they stepped up and said they were good ideas but he was terrible. Him winning a leadership election doesn't change that they said and believed that, so everyone will know a majority of the MPs will think he isn't up to it even if they don't say it, and that they will be lying if they say they do think he's up to it, since what occurred to make them now think he was up to it? Winning the leadership wouldn't do it, since his ability to win that was already known as possible.
Now, you can get away with lying about divisions, Blair and Brown getting along just fine being an example, but it's not helpful.
The closest historical analogies I can think of are the millennial cults, or the Xhosa people killing all their cattle in order to expel the white man.
There might be some sharp fights for candidate selection, but wholesale reselection isn't going to be practical without support from the top.
It'll probably be the "soft left" in the driving seat rather than the "moderates", but if the hard left lose the leadership they're pretty much sunk.
The Kings Fund does a lot of analysis on health spending. http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2016/06/uk-spending-health-care-and-social-care provides more detail on the adjustments related to social care (a good proportion of which is private).
But I just can't understand why they think JC is the person to lead them to the promised land.
There were certainly lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system but were there really lots of other people who contributed to the Ultra system more?
Ultimately, that is Labour's problem. Things aren't perfect, but to the voters (i.e. people my age and older) they've been a hell of a lot worse. Apocalyptic rhetoric from Labour just isn't credible.
For example, the NHS is 71 years old. The Tories have been in power for 41 of those, 54 if you count Blair. It's still struggling on in its eternal crisis. No one wants to privatise it or destroy it, yet here's Owen ranting on about it today.
There is no generation that the next generation will be Corbynites, they could just as equally view Corbynism as part of the establishment by then and seek an alternative to displace the Tories.
Among mathematicians.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-War-Spies-Guerrillas-1939-1945/dp/0007503741
It's a bit disjointed, but that's probably inevitable given the nature of the subject. Overall, though, it's excellent in describing what our allies and our enemies were up to.
1. The main people going off to work with/in ISIS are young. They are very rarely middle aged or older.
2. Key focus has to be on who are the influencers on young muslims? Some clearly in this country are in plain sight amongst the islamic education establishments and networks. Some outside the country are communicating through the internet and social networks.
Rooting out the bad influencers that are in this country, is essential and I would have thought the easiest to trace and monitor.
Monitoring those who "tune into" the fundamentalists via communications networks, would to my eyes not be the hardest job once insight is created into the main poisonous channels and these are treated as a "dark side of the internet" and all who look there have their contacts monitored.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff5679dc-f0f8-11e5-9f20-c3a047354386.html
@georgeeaton: Some Labour MPs genuinely more optimistic about Smith's chances than CLP nominations suggest. Not just spinning.
@georgeeaton: On CLP nominations: "Not accurate reflection of wider membership. Many quiet, moderate members don't attend".
It was obvious that if the Labour MPs want to defeat Corbyn, they needed a unity candidate to all support.
And they picked... Smith.
I think they want to lose.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/pollsters-trump-approaching-zero-hour-227000
I would be very wary of this guy in general
There's a good opportunity here for the government to use the lack of serious opposition to its advantage. There's loads of things that have been on the too-difficult list since Major and Blair's time for lack of political will in the face of the need for change.
Blair in particular had two massive majorities but failed to be radical enough. The minimum wage was a good example of what he did achieve in his first term, but that's balanced by the devolution cockup - which very nearly broke the Union a decade and a half later. Maybe May can cement her legacy early on with the same radical thinking as another woman did in the same position.
Oh, and build the damn Heathrow runway. And another one while we've got the diggers out!
I remember last year, when it was looking like Corbyn was going to win, I think team Burnham or Cooper said their private polling showed them winning, he was very dismissive of their private polls.
Both he and Stephen Bush predicted Corbyn would win before most, and even before the polls showed he would.
Someone better.
Genuine question - why did he not stand? If he could not win, why not?
A bit late to the party for naming May's followers.
What about May-dens?
Clinton 272 .. Trump 190 .. Toss-ups 76
http://cookpolitical.com/presidential/charts/scorecard
http://cookpolitical.com/story/9855
But you can't grt away from the NEC result. The MPs and Don are wrong.
I'm a) Tight b) Like good jobs doing.
Which means waiting ;p
It is because we are not thinking properly about this potentially fundamental contradiction, because we have accepted the muddleheadedness behind multi-culturalism (as if it were merely about having exotic foods and brightly coloured clothes and different languages in our high streets) that we get a ludicrous focus on particular symbols (e.g. the burka or the burkini in France). They become the focus for a more general unease with what happens when you introduce into a society people with very different ideas who seem to be resistant to or unwilling to go along with the expected integration or who positively reject it. France has faced the brunt of this struggle. But all Western nations with a Muslim minority have the same issue, to a greater or lesser extent: us, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark. How we deal with this is one of the political issues of our time and will, I fear, continue to be so for some time to come.
(Edited for grammar.)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/?platform=hootsuite
With Labour where it is on the political spectrum right now a centre candidate or a Blairite wouldn't stand any chance.
Smith has only one job and that's removing Corbyn, once he's done that he's probably finished as well longer term. I don't see his political views as appealing to the electorate but he will have saved his party if he succeeds.
Clinton 288 .. Trump 174 .. Toss-ups 76
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/clinton-surges-past-270-electoral-votes-nbc-news-battleground-map-n630851