I'm intrigued to know how Bufo the Kipper is going to "take the matter further" with regards to my implication that UKIP supporters like a spot of dogging.
The court case could be fascinating, as UKIP present all the evidence of their voters not ever dogging, ever.
He's going to take you to a dogging meet, and ask the participants to tell you who they vote for, and thus prove there's no UKIP doggers.
I'm intrigued to know how Bufo the Kipper is going to "take the matter further" with regards to my implication that UKIP supporters like a spot of dogging.
The court case could be fascinating, as UKIP present all the evidence of their voters not ever dogging, ever.
To dog someone is to cause trouble for them.
UKIP have certainly caused trouble for the other parties.
Therefore to find UKIPs who are "dogging", seems reasonable.
just listened to the R4 Bryant interview, I now understand why Armando Iannucci stopped writing TTOI, it's just too damned hard to better our politicians.
DT headlines today: "Bryant defends attack on Tesco"; "Bryant backs down on Tesco"; "Bryant: Labour sending strong and coherent message"
Labour had a good political strategy on immigration until Bryant opened his gob.
Labour strategy was to sure up they vote on immigration or make the the british public angry who are worried on immigration ,in which these voters would have gone to ukip and proberly not the tories,so it was a win,win for labour until the message got messed up.
They was a lot of support on what labour was saying on Eastern Europeans getting jobs before brits on the radio 5 phone in this morning,the strategy might still have worked.
just listened to the R4 Bryant interview, I now understand why Armando Iannucci stopped writing TTOI, it's just too damned hard to better our politicians.
I don't think they ever really got a handle on the coalition. They tried to get comedy out of tension between Con and Lib, but that didn't really work because there's supposed to be tension there.
Meanwhile after what Chris Morris did to news there was nothing left to mock. You need to take the original thing at least a little bit seriously for the comedy to work, but after Brass Eye you it was impossible to believe anything about the regular news programs.
The one thing the 10 o'clock show got absolutely spot on was a news clip with Ed Milliband narrated by David Mitchell in the character of Mark from Peep Show and that *worked* as it was close to how people could perceive him.
just listened to the R4 Bryant interview, I now understand why Armando Iannucci stopped writing TTOI, it's just too damned hard to better our politicians.
I don't think they ever really got a handle on the coalition. They tried to get comedy out of tension between Con and Lib, but that didn't really work because there's supposed to be tension there.
Meanwhile after what Chris Morris did to news there was nothing left to mock. You need to take the original thing at least a little bit seriously for the comedy to work, but after Brass Eye you it was impossible to believe anything about the regular news programs.
re. your previous point on the (non?) speech & it creating a narrative, which I agree is to place, however subliminally into the public's mind, the idea that Lab is "doing something" on big business/immigration/workers' rights you name it.
Having also just listened to the R4 interview, the difference between that and, say, the vans, is that it is hugely more incompetent. The vans was quite polished, a stealth, sniper strike so that before people realised (in political fallout terms) it was already imprinted into the subconscious.
Bryant is just, as has been noted above, beyond parody.
If Gibraltar was in Schengen the checks wouldn't be allowed, so they'd have a slam-dunk legal case, which the Commission would certainly be interested in pursuing.
Schengen would make no difference. Gibraltar's official status is as a British Overseas territory and, just like French and Dutch Overseas Territories, it would be specifically excluded from the Schengen area even if the UK were a member. The only way that Gibraltar would be able to get free borders would be by joining Schengen in its own right and given that it is a territory with a disputed status I don't see there being a cat in hells chance of the Spanish agreeing to that.
Funny article, which also informed me that the DT has an "Immigration News" page. This must be unique amongst the national press (I can't bring myself to check the Daily Mail).
"It was sloppy and appeared to be misinformed. Chris Bryant even veered towards the language of resignation statements when he said he took "full responsibility" for the way extracts of the speech were released in advance to a newspaper."
If Gibraltar was in Schengen the checks wouldn't be allowed, so they'd have a slam-dunk legal case, which the Commission would certainly be interested in pursuing.
Schengen would make no difference. Gibraltar's official status is as a British Overseas territory and, just like French and Dutch Overseas Territories, it would be specifically excluded from the Schengen area even if the UK were a member. The only way that Gibraltar would be able to get free borders would be by joining Schengen in its own right and given that it is a territory with a disputed status I don't see there being a cat in hells chance of the Spanish agreeing to that.
If Gibraltar was in Schengen the checks wouldn't be allowed, so they'd have a slam-dunk legal case, which the Commission would certainly be interested in pursuing.
Schengen would make no difference. Gibraltar's official status is as a British Overseas territory and, just like French and Dutch Overseas Territories, it would be specifically excluded from the Schengen area even if the UK were a member. The only way that Gibraltar would be able to get free borders would be by joining Schengen in its own right and given that it is a territory with a disputed status I don't see there being a cat in hells chance of the Spanish agreeing to that.
The Defence Secretary has previously told Parliament that the first of the new carriers will commence sea trials in 2017, but rumours from Marham reach me that suggest sea trials may begin in 2014.
I know there are a couple of people on here who have more knowledge of these matters than I - this became clear when the government had to announce it was giving up on the catapults - so is anyone willing to confirm the date one way or the other?
IANAE, but I would be surprised if we could get the Queen Elizabeth on sea trials next year - it has not even been launched yet.
Even if we did, what would we fly off it? We already have one or two 'copter carriers, but the Harriers are long gone (and lacked radar anyway) and the F35 won't be in service until 2020 (although because of the unusual way the project is being handled, we had the first delivered last year)
I suppose we could always hire some life-expired Harriers off the Spanish navy ... :-)
So they have regional shortlists (as all parties do) but now all English members will vote on the whole England list (they have 10 preferences) regardless of which regions they are in.
DT reporting Greek economy "only" shrank by 4.6%. have we become that hardened to economic catastrophe ?
And before we become hardened to bad news from the periphery, the FT relay even worse news for the core.
European banks need to cut 3.2 trn euros in assets by 2018 in order to comply with the Basel III regulations.
The largest financial institutions need to shed €661 bn in assets and come up with €47 bn in capital, while smaller banks would be required to remove €2.6 trn from their balance sheets.
These figures which derive from a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) analysis were published by the FT on Sunday.
The RBS report pointed to Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and Barclays as the banks that have the largest need of increasing capital.
According to FT, Europe's banking sector has total assets of €32 trn and already cut their balance sheets by €2.9 trn since May 2012.
Now, no voter will feel any immediate effect from this announcement, but the impact on the Eurozone will be a sustained credit squeeze, with depressed lending and investment growth as banks take their time to repair their balance sheets and comply with the new capital adequacy requirements.
The good news for the UK is that, apart from Barclays who are shortly to raise most of the additional capital required from a £5.8 bn rights, the UK banks are reasonably well capitalised.
So just the small matters of a sale of Lloyds and the restructuring of RBoS to go.
I tried to make UKIP list as exciting as possible this morning. But apart from sitting MEPs, former by-election candidates and Lawrence Webb, I don't know many of the rest.
The system is weird...it should favour people with national profile...but apart from sitting MEPs, Arnatt, O'Flynn do any of the rest have a real national profile?
Membership in big regions can decide the outcome in smaller regions but if South East members don't put any West Midlands candidates on their ballot as they don't have a clue on who they are anyway, the regional breakdown could be not fully affected. The system should favour candidates who can spend money on a national campaign. And candidates coming from another region (the SW organizer standing in West Midlands will get votes from SW members while the other WM candidates are unknown there)
So I guess the selection system will indeed screw the outcome for top spot but probably not much for remaining spots. As UKIP is now aiming for more than 1 seat in many regions, the pool of candidates in winnable positions won't change by much but their safeness will
Kellner is good at summarising past political arguments and their impact on public opinion.
He even manages to summarise in a single paragraph tim's entire output of 6,000 PB posts:
Labour's narrative is very different. It starts with some solid statistics about the course of the recession: that recovery started in 2009 and was well under way in the spring of 2010 – only to shudder to a halt when the coalition came to office. Since then we have seen almost three years of flatlining and a succession of mixed government targets – badly undershooting on growth and overshooting on government borrowing.
Where Kellner is weak is on interpreting the economy; distinguishing between cause and claim; using that knowledge to predict future economic trends and outcomes; and then predicting the impact on the political debate and public opinion.
Economists are no longer debating whether the UK has achieved sufficient growth velocity to escape recession. Barring external shocks, this is a taken. The debate has shifted to whether productivity, down 8% since the financial crisis, will recover over the short term, and, whether there is sufficient slack in the post-recessionary economy to move a further million unemployed back into work without causing inflation to take off. A further debate is on whether net investment will reverse its decline and start growing at rates similar to current GDP growth.
If productivity, investment and non-inflationary re-employment can be achieved in the short to medium term - and the consensus probability of this happening is marginally higher than 50% - then the economic effect will be an acceleration of both public and business confidence, and, most importantly, in real standards of living.
This will change the media, public and polling agenda in the next two years. The discussion will no longer be are we growing or are we more confident than before, but how will the rewards of austerity be distributed and what are the risks? Will the payback be in increased spend on public services; on a 'fairer' redistribution of wealth and income; or on gradual easing of the personal tax burden in return for continued, non-inflationary real income rises and high employment?
Or, put simply, the political agenda is changing to the questions of tax and spend, or, reward and relieve?
And Kellner, unsurprisingly as a psephologist rather than economiist, is behind the tide.
Comments
It's good to hear that David Cameron is coming out against "politically motivated and disproportionate" border controls.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-23664721
10 o'clock live is just a bit shit in comparison to the Chris morris / spitting image / NTNOCN of old.
It's a shame.
UKIP have certainly caused trouble for the other parties.
Therefore to find UKIPs who are "dogging", seems reasonable.
DT headlines today: "Bryant defends attack on Tesco"; "Bryant backs down on Tesco"; "Bryant: Labour sending strong and coherent message"
Labour had a good political strategy on immigration until Bryant opened his gob.
Labour strategy was to sure up they vote on immigration or make the the british public angry who are worried on immigration ,in which these voters would have gone to ukip and proberly not the tories,so it was a win,win for labour until the message got messed up.
They was a lot of support on what labour was saying on Eastern Europeans getting jobs before brits on the radio 5 phone in this morning,the strategy might still have worked.
Meanwhile after what Chris Morris did to news there was nothing left to mock. You need to take the original thing at least a little bit seriously for the comedy to work, but after Brass Eye you it was impossible to believe anything about the regular news programs.
Is that understood?
The rest "errr, yeah, boo Tories, lol"
Having also just listened to the R4 interview, the difference between that and, say, the vans, is that it is hugely more incompetent. The vans was quite polished, a stealth, sniper strike so that before people realised (in political fallout terms) it was already imprinted into the subconscious.
Bryant is just, as has been noted above, beyond parody.
Michael Deacon watches Chris Bryant, Labour's immigration spokesman, show Theresa May how to 'get the basics right' and avoid a 'shambles'.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10237628/Sketch-Chris-Bryants-messaging-masterclass.html?x
lol
http://tinyurl.com/mamhgpo
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23662668
Have odds on Bryant leaving changed?
http://www.panorama.gi/localnews/headlines.php?action=view_article&article=478
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/12/economy-uk-labour-tories
It's a very good summary in my view.
Even if we did, what would we fly off it? We already have one or two 'copter carriers, but the Harriers are long gone (and lacked radar anyway) and the F35 won't be in service until 2020 (although because of the unusual way the project is being handled, we had the first delivered last year)
I suppose we could always hire some life-expired Harriers off the Spanish navy ... :-)
Below is the only link I could find mentioning 2014 sea trials for QE:
http://www.naval-technology.com/features/featuremarch-stories-littoral-ships-queen-elizabeth-milestones
I think someone's confused launching with trials, forgetting all the unnecessary fitting-out that'll need to be done.
http://ukip.org/newsroom/news/758-ukip-announces-list-for-the-european-elections
So they have regional shortlists (as all parties do) but now all English members will vote on the whole England list (they have 10 preferences) regardless of which regions they are in.
European banks need to cut 3.2 trn euros in assets by 2018 in order to comply with the Basel III regulations.
The largest financial institutions need to shed €661 bn in assets and come up with €47 bn in capital, while smaller banks would be required to remove €2.6 trn from their balance sheets.
These figures which derive from a Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) analysis were published by the FT on Sunday.
The RBS report pointed to Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and Barclays as the banks that have the largest need of increasing capital.
According to FT, Europe's banking sector has total assets of €32 trn and already cut their balance sheets by €2.9 trn since May 2012.
Now, no voter will feel any immediate effect from this announcement, but the impact on the Eurozone will be a sustained credit squeeze, with depressed lending and investment growth as banks take their time to repair their balance sheets and comply with the new capital adequacy requirements.
The good news for the UK is that, apart from Barclays who are shortly to raise most of the additional capital required from a £5.8 bn rights, the UK banks are reasonably well capitalised.
So just the small matters of a sale of Lloyds and the restructuring of RBoS to go.
UKIP MEP’s Shortlist; as presented by Guido
Eastern – shortlist
Patrick O’Flynn
Stuart Agnew
Tim Aker
Andrew Smith
Michael Heaver
Andy Monk
Mick McGough
East Midlands – shortlist
Roger Helmer
Margot Parker
Jonathan Bullock
Barry Mahoney
Nigel Wickens
London – shortlist
Paul Oakley
Gerard Batten
Andrew McNeilis
Anthony Brown
Elizabeth Jones
Lawrence Webb
Alastair McFarlane
Peter Whittle
North East – shortlist
Jonathan Arnott
John Tennant
Richard Elvin
North West – shortlist
Paul Nuttall
Michael McManus
Louise Bours
Shneur Odze
Steven Woolfe
Lee Slaughter
Peter Harper
Simon Noble
South East – shortlist
Nigel Farage
Janice Atkinson
Ray Finch
Diane James
Nigel Jones
Simon Strutt
Patricia Culligan
Alan Stevens
Donna Edmunds
Barry Cooper
South West – shortlist
Gawain Towler
Julia Reid
Tony McIntyre
William Dartmouth
Keith Crawford
Robert Smith
West Midlands – shortlist
Jill Seymour
Phil Henrick
Bill Etheridge
James Carver
Michael Wrench
Michael Green
Lyndon Jones
Yorks & N Lincs – shortlist
Godfrey Bloom
Jane Collins
Jason Smith
Amjad Bashir
Mike Hookem
Gary Shores
Scotland – shortlist
David Coburn
Mike Scott-Hayward
Christopher Monckton
Otto Inglis
Paul Henke
Malcolm Macaskill
Ross Durance
Steven McKeane
Kevin Newton
Wales – shortlist
Nathan Gill
James Cole
Gareth Dunn
David Rowlands
Caroline Jones
Martyn Ford
Brian Morris
Members now vote, but it’s looking increasingly likely that Express hack Patrick O’Flynn is off to Europe…
So want to know how much Guardian journalists are paid? Guido has the leaked figures...
Could be interesting
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-23664210
The system is weird...it should favour people with national profile...but apart from sitting MEPs, Arnatt, O'Flynn do any of the rest have a real national profile?
Membership in big regions can decide the outcome in smaller regions but if South East members don't put any West Midlands candidates on their ballot as they don't have a clue on who they are anyway, the regional breakdown could be not fully affected.
The system should favour candidates who can spend money on a national campaign. And candidates coming from another region (the SW organizer standing in West Midlands will get votes from SW members while the other WM candidates are unknown there)
So I guess the selection system will indeed screw the outcome for top spot but probably not much for remaining spots. As UKIP is now aiming for more than 1 seat in many regions, the pool of candidates in winnable positions won't change by much but their safeness will
Kellner article
Kellner is good at summarising past political arguments and their impact on public opinion.
He even manages to summarise in a single paragraph tim's entire output of 6,000 PB posts:
Labour's narrative is very different. It starts with some solid statistics about the course of the recession: that recovery started in 2009 and was well under way in the spring of 2010 – only to shudder to a halt when the coalition came to office. Since then we have seen almost three years of flatlining and a succession of mixed government targets – badly undershooting on growth and overshooting on government borrowing.
Where Kellner is weak is on interpreting the economy; distinguishing between cause and claim; using that knowledge to predict future economic trends and outcomes; and then predicting the impact on the political debate and public opinion.
Economists are no longer debating whether the UK has achieved sufficient growth velocity to escape recession. Barring external shocks, this is a taken. The debate has shifted to whether productivity, down 8% since the financial crisis, will recover over the short term, and, whether there is sufficient slack in the post-recessionary economy to move a further million unemployed back into work without causing inflation to take off. A further debate is on whether net investment will reverse its decline and start growing at rates similar to current GDP growth.
If productivity, investment and non-inflationary re-employment can be achieved in the short to medium term - and the consensus probability of this happening is marginally higher than 50% - then the economic effect will be an acceleration of both public and business confidence, and, most importantly, in real standards of living.
This will change the media, public and polling agenda in the next two years. The discussion will no longer be are we growing or are we more confident than before, but how will the rewards of austerity be distributed and what are the risks? Will the payback be in increased spend on public services; on a 'fairer' redistribution of wealth and income; or on gradual easing of the personal tax burden in return for continued, non-inflationary real income rises and high employment?
Or, put simply, the political agenda is changing to the questions of tax and spend, or, reward and relieve?
And Kellner, unsurprisingly as a psephologist rather than economiist, is behind the tide.
Some real headbangers in the comments pages.