Isn't the whole point of that tweet providing the evidence that she's not just a neo-Thatcherite?
No. The tweet is a smear.
We see this all the time. Like when similar Conservatives are accused of being racist or fascist (or both) for appearing at a debate with the wrong sort of people. Personally, I think Chloe is too ideological but she’s not unpleasant and nor is she is a racist.
If there’s prima facie evidence of her having wholly unpalatable views then let’s hear it.
Until then it’s just a crude political attempt to damage the Government by reaching into the past and smearing her by association, which is being an institutional speciality of social media. Probably because it’s effective far too often.
Isn't it pretty much the entire basis for the Corbyn anti semitism stuff?
I don't know that you've been much involved in that yourself but you can hardly complain about these tactics being used back against the Conservatives...
No, there’s enough evidence internally and externally that there is a problem with anti-Semitic attitudes in Corbyn’s Labour now. And it needs to be addressed.
However, all sides use these tactics now.
They work.
Most polling seems to show a greater problem for the Conservatives, regardless of the attacks of the other side.
I assure you Gloucester isn't a fantasy Malcolm, I lived there for several years.
Yes but a poncy council seat does not a government make. It is the usual frenzy of fantasy on here. They are just as crap as they were last week, nothing has changed other than a different donkey is pulling the cart. If they are the answer then the country really is well and truly F****d, they are rank rotten, lying toerags without principles. PS: I am sure Gloucester is a very nice place.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
One of the most irritating things about the election of Boris is how the magazine has gone completely doolally for him. It’s like it’s an in-house journalistic mouthpiece devoted to his advocacy and has lost all objectivity.
This is disappointing as I usually rely on it as a useful and sober perspective on conservative politics.
I may now have to look elsewhere for that.
Brexit has made the Spectator a supermarket tabloid for affluent reactionaries. In fairness, that’s a very profitable niche.
It contains some very useful and insightful writing, some of which goes against the editorial line like Matthew Paris, for example.
It’s the likes of James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson who are starting to disappoint me.
Fraser Nelson could be a no deal Brexit bot and we wouldn’t notice any difference.
Nelson is one of those promising young men who turned out to be a big flop in middle age. The planet is jam-packed full of them.
Personally, I’m aging like a fine Bordeaux. Peak Stuart is a long way off.
As Spectator editor Nelson’s job is to put together a publication that attracts subscribers, advertisers and sponsors. He does it very well. There is a big market for reactionary, racist and libertarian writing which he has tapped into, following the lead from his predecessor Boris Johnson.
I assure you Gloucester isn't a fantasy Malcolm, I lived there for several years.
Yes but a poncy council seat does not a government make. It is the usual frenzy of fantasy on here. They are just as crap as they were last week, nothing has changed other than a different donkey is pulling the cart. If they are the answer then the country really is well and truly F****d, they are rank rotten, lying toerags without principles. PS: I am sure Gloucester is a very nice place.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
You cheerfully vote for Corbyn and I note you have actually given up trying to defend his track record on antisemitism. That said, so has he.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
One of the most irritating things about the election of Boris is how the magazine has gone completely doolally for him. It’s like it’s an in-house journalistic mouthpiece devoted to his advocacy and has lost all objectivity.
This is disappointing as I usually rely on it as a useful and sober perspective on conservative politics.
I may now have to look elsewhere for that.
I gave up my subscription after one too many casually racist or prejudiced articles by Charles Moore.
I assure you Gloucester isn't a fantasy Malcolm, I lived there for several years.
Yes but a poncy council seat does not a government make. It is the usual frenzy of fantasy on here. They are just as crap as they were last week, nothing has changed other than a different donkey is pulling the cart. If they are the answer then the country really is well and truly F****d, they are rank rotten, lying toerags without principles. PS: I am sure Gloucester is a very nice place.
It isn't actually. The Cathedral close is charming and there are some fine buildings - the New Inn, St Mary de Crypt, and the Guildhall spring to mind. But most of it is a concrete jungle due to the tender mercies of a bunch of drunken paederasts, sorry, urban planners in the 1960s who made the architects of Euston look competent. The people also tend to be quite abrupt (cue jokes at my expense) and parochial.
That is why, although I would agree with you about not taking parish (sic) council by-elections too seriously, I would say this is yet another indication of something rather strange going on. The Liberal Democrats should not be winning in Gloucester, especially not this bit, if it is business as usual.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
One of the most irritating things about the election of Boris is how the magazine has gone completely doolally for him. It’s like it’s an in-house journalistic mouthpiece devoted to his advocacy and has lost all objectivity.
This is disappointing as I usually rely on it as a useful and sober perspective on conservative politics.
I may now have to look elsewhere for that.
I'm not unsympathetic - there's no reason why there can't be a critique of the Johnson Government from the centre-right as well. Indeed, the most trenchant criticism of Osborne's economic policies in my view came not from the centre-left but from people like Allister Heath on the monetarist side.
This is the problem generally and it's a big problem on here at the moment.
The tit-for-tat knockabout where a pro-Labour poster has a go at the Conservatives and vice versa and everyone piles in on the LDs is tedious, time wasting pointless piffle. Too many on here do that - big up their own side, attack the other sides and walk away thinking they've contributed.
No, a million times no and it's the same for those who criticise everyone. Relentless negativity about everyone is as tedious as relentless negativity about one side and relentless positivity about another side.
The truly interesting posts and posters are those who dare to critique their own side and praise the opposition side. Genuine insight comes from recognising what your side is doing wrong and what the other side is doing right. Taking that insight and saying it out loud in a forum like this is a step.
To fail to see the mote in one's own eye is as bad as claiming there's only a beam. Shutting down by bluster genuine scrutiny and criticism of your own side by your own side is authoritarian and ultimately counter-productive.
Democracy works when people realise one side doesn't have all the answers or that one minority, or even a majority, are the only group that matters when it comes to policy setting. Parties in Government have a duty to the whole country not just those who voted for them or for a particular policy.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
Labour members continue to prioritise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership over defeating the Tories. Until that changes MPs are hamstrung. The last 24 hours have shown just how peripheral Labour is to the debate now. It was neatly encapsulated yesterday in the party’s failure to back a VONC and that hilariously embarrassing rally in Parliament Square in which Corbyn mouthed the usual platitudes to a few hundred random Trots and members of the SWP. Glastonbury 2017 seems like an age ago.
One of the most irritating things about the election of Boris is how the magazine has gone completely doolally for him. It’s like it’s an in-house journalistic mouthpiece devoted to his advocacy and has lost all objectivity.
This is disappointing as I usually rely on it as a useful and sober perspective on conservative politics.
I may now have to look elsewhere for that.
The Spectator is a product by spotty student politicos, for spotty student politicos. (Of all ages.)
After three years of stern austerity, the spotty student right is now fully in charge of the former Conservative and Unionist Party.
The magazine isn’t actually like that actually, it’s really rather good, but the editorial lines have deteriorated and it’s starting to affect the political analysis.
In a competition between Viz, The National, Private Eye, The Economist and The Spectator, The Spectator always comes in last place, so, excluding the free articles I’m allowed and a cheeky free-read at library/newsagent, I’ll have to take your word for it.
Though NS does not say it, one can't help wondering if Boris's praise for GMO crops is preparing us to roll over for American demands as part of an FTA.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
You cheerfully vote for Corbyn and I note you have actually given up trying to defend his track record on antisemitism. That said, so has he.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
But Corbyn and Johnson have none.
Hmm that is strange... you made a comment about my lack of defence but I have searched your comment and can't find your defence of the racism and xenophobia you voted for?
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
PB has always been strange technically, right from the start.
Nothing to do with technical problems, but I’m just curious as to why PB is absent from FB? Just seems a bit old-fashioned to be invisible there.
Though NS does not say it, one can't help wondering if Boris's praise for GMO crops is preparing us to roll over for American demands as part of an FTA.
I'm not unsympathetic - there's no reason why there can't be a critique of the Johnson Government from the centre-right as well. Indeed, the most trenchant criticism of Osborne's economic policies in my view came not from the centre-left but from people like Allister Heath on the monetarist side.
This is the problem generally and it's a big problem on here at the moment.
The tit-for-tat knockabout where a pro-Labour poster has a go at the Conservatives and vice versa and everyone piles in on the LDs is tedious, time wasting pointless piffle. Too many on here do that - big up their own side, attack the other sides and walk away thinking they've contributed.
No, a million times no and it's the same for those who criticise everyone. Relentless negativity about everyone is as tedious as relentless negativity about one side and relentless positivity about another side.
The truly interesting posts and posters are those who dare to critique their own side and praise the opposition side. Genuine insight comes from recognising what your side is doing wrong and what the other side is doing right. Taking that insight and saying it out loud in a forum like this is a step.
To fail to see the mote in one's own eye is as bad as claiming there's only a beam. Shutting down by bluster genuine scrutiny and criticism of your own side by your own side is authoritarian and ultimately counter-productive.
Democracy works when people realise one side doesn't have all the answers or that one minority, or even a majority, are the only group that matters when it comes to policy setting. Parties in Government have a duty to the whole country not just those who voted for them or for a particular policy.
As usual, a very pious posting from a LibDem ... who actually are some of the worst offenders on here.
When I said I had once voted LibDem, and would never again, I particularly remember a poster who suggested (fallaciously) that I had made up this electoral story.
That poster's name .. err, stodge.
But, this is a typical LibDem act. The bad boys & girls are the Tories and Labour and the SNP who behave like little children, while the "grown up" LibDem party is above such childishness.
The ex Tory MP for Brecon is a "crook" for minor troughing, but the LibDems caught troughing (like David Laws who makes Chris Davies look like a small time apprentice) escape all censure.
Who in the LibDems ever called David Laws a crook? Or censured him at the time?
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
The small window may already be shut.
Let us assume that both of the ideal scenarios for Boris come to pass - Firstly he delivers BREXIT and Farage and co drift toward single figures or secondly having failed to deliver BREXIT in October he goes for a general election on a No Deal prospectus.
The small window might be firmly locked by the reality of economic difficulties as aspects of "Project Fear" begin to take shape and the optics become sub-optimal. Relying on the competence of this administration to steer a steady course might be considered a tad optimistic although in fairness the curse of Grayling has been lifted - a sliver of hope emerges .....
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
You cheerfully vote for Corbyn and I note you have actually given up trying to defend his track record on antisemitism. That said, so has he.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
But Corbyn and Johnson have none.
Hmm that is strange... you made a comment about my lack of defence but I have searched your comment and can't find your defence of the racism and xenophobia you voted for?
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
I have never supported no deal rhetoric. If you have nothing to say, at least don't make things up.
And I note you still haven't addressed the main point. Don't you find it depressing that at the moment we have simple tribal mudslinging over racism, when it's eating its way into both main parties (and it's not as though the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and SNP are immune, and as for UKIP and the Faragistas...)
I'm more concerned that instead of its being addressed as a general problem that needs sorting out, it's being used in an attempt to score political points - as you are doing.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
You cheerfully vote for Corbyn and I note you have actually given up trying to defend his track record on antisemitism. That said, so has he.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
But Corbyn and Johnson have none.
Hmm that is strange... you made a comment about my lack of defence but I have searched your comment and can't find your defence of the racism and xenophobia you voted for?
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
I have never supported no deal rhetoric. If you have nothing to say, at least don't make things up.
And I note you still haven't addressed the main point. Don't you find it depressing that at the moment we have simple tribal mudslinging over racism, when it's eating its way into both main parties (and it's not as though the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and SNP are immune, and as for UKIP and the Faragistas...)
I'm more concerned that instead of its being addressed as a general problem that needs sorting out, it's being used in an attempt to score political points - as you are doing.
I don't think you are deeply concerned at all, you have been consistent in using it as a political weapon against Corbyn who you oppose for other reasons and now when I call you out on your own voting all of a sudden you are concerned about it being used for political point scoring?!
Not buying it.
It was May's rhetoric and you who said she was intelligent, you didn't mention economic competence though (I seemed to imagine that part...)
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
The small window may already be shut.
Let us assume that both of the ideal scenarios for Boris come to pass - Firstly he delivers BREXIT and Farage and co drift toward single figures or secondly having failed to deliver BREXIT in October he goes for a general election on a No Deal prospectus.
The small window might be firmly locked by the reality of economic difficulties as aspects of "Project Fear" begin to take shape and the optics become sub-optimal. Relying on the competence of this administration to steer a steady course might be considered a tad optimistic although in fairness the curse of Grayling has been lifted - a sliver of hope emerges .....
What is remarkable about Johnson’s Cabinet is that Grayling is not in it, but it is still of lower calibre than May’s dire efforts. Williamson at Education is perhaps the worst Cabinet appointment of all time, although Raab at FCO and Patel at the Home Office run it close.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
Just been listening to Radio 5. Nikki Campbell has just given Kit Malthouse both barrels because his chum Mark Francois referred to 'Junker in the bunker' on Newsnight last night. "Do you think that's acceptable language?" "Does your friend and colleague have the slightest idea what happened to Luxembourg when the Germans invaded in 1940?"
Lot's of spluttering by the hapless Malthouse. A small sliver of Achilles Heel showing. Like UKIP it's easy to forget the Tories now have their own nutters. Not least Johnson himself.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
Johnson and his cabinet from hell has probably helped unite Labour, even some of Corbyn's biggest enemies would rather a Corbyn led Labour government than the current one continuing.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
Putin is no doubt very happy with Boris Johnson’s elevation too. I have no idea why you might think otherwise.
I think you're looking at geopolitics solely through the lens of Brexit, in which case you're probably right. I'm taking a broader view, in which their interests most definitely do not align, regardless of conspiracy theories about links with Bannon etc. It's similar to how Trump and Putin on paper are very close, but Trump was prepared to bomb Syria when Russia overreached, while Obama chickened out in similar circumstances. The one good thing Johnson did at the Foreign Office was the response to Russia on Salisbury.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
Chloe Westley isn’t far-right, she’s an Australian neo-Thatcherite.
I know there’s no difference in the eyes of the Left but the fascist labelling and comparisons became very tiresome a long time ago.
Isn't the whole point of that tweet providing the evidence that she's not just a neo-Thatcherite?
No. The tweet is a smear.
We see this all the time. Like when similar Conservatives are accused of being racist or fascist (or both) for appearing at a debate with the wrong sort of people. Personally, I think Chloe is too ideological but she’s not unpleasant and nor is she is a racist.
If there’s prima facie evidence of her having wholly unpalatable views then let’s hear it.
Until then it’s just a crude political attempt to damage the Government by reaching into the past and smearing her by association, which is being an institutional speciality of social media. Probably because it’s effective far too often.
It's of course possible that the tweet was a mistake, or that she's since changed her views, but referring to her having calling an open bigot a "hero" is hardly smearing by association.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
Chloe Westley isn’t far-right, she’s an Australian neo-Thatcherite.
I know there’s no difference in the eyes of the Left but the fascist labelling and comparisons became very tiresome a long time ago.
Isn't the whole point of that tweet providing the evidence that she's not just a neo-Thatcherite?
No. The tweet is a smear.
We see this all the time. Like when similar Conservatives are accused of being racist or fascist (or both) for appearing at a debate with the wrong sort of people. Personally, I think Chloe is too ideological but she’s not unpleasant and nor is she is a racist.
If there’s prima facie evidence of her having wholly unpalatable views then let’s hear it.
Until then it’s just a crude political attempt to damage the Government by reaching into the past and smearing her by association, which is being an institutional speciality of social media. Probably because it’s effective far too often.
So is the tweet attributed to her a fake?
The original is not, no. The retweet is trying to dogwhistle her as a racist.
That’s the smear.
Just for reference do you mean this part tweeted by Otto English?
'In 2016 Boris Johnson's new digital adviser Chloe Westley enthusiastically backed renowned racist Ann Marie Waters who had just set up Pergida UK with one Tommy Robinson.
I see Westley has been deleting old tweets including this.'
Which part of that is untrue?
She is Boris Johnson's new digital advisor She tweeted that in 2016 Calling someone a hero = enthusiastic backing That Anne Marie Waters is a racist That she had just set up Pergida UK with Tommy Robinson
Or that Chloe deleted it?
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I believe the term is sophistry. It crosses political boundaries.
As usual, a very pious posting from a LibDem ... who actually are some of the worst offenders on here.
When I said I had once voted LibDem, and would never again, I particularly remember a poster who suggested (fallaciously) that I had made up this electoral story.
That poster's name .. err, stodge.
But, this is a typical LibDem act. The bad boys & girls are the Tories and Labour and the SNP who behave like little children, while the "grown up" LibDem party is above such childishness.
The ex Tory MP for Brecon is a "crook" for minor troughing, but the LibDems caught troughing (like David Laws who makes Chris Davies look like a small time apprentice) escape all censure.
Who in the LibDems ever called David Laws a crook? Or censured him at the time?
Pious, eh, I've been called worse.
I regularly criticise my own party on its policies and what it has done and, yes, I critique some of the other parties but I lack the tunnel vision of those who think only one party is ever in the wrong and only one party never criticises its own.
You'd better believe a lot of LDs weren't happy with Laws but in truth many were happy to see him go as he was seen as the extreme end of the Orange Bookers who were ideologically perceived to be too close to Cameron's so-called "liberal conservatism".
You don't like the LDs and think we're all a bunch of hypocrites, then? Fair enough, I'll put you down as a "maybe".
If, however, I impugned you by accusing you of making up a story about having once voted Liberal Democrat, I'm happy to apologise and retract my comment. Clearly, you did once vote LD and have decided you can do so no longer. Fair enough.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
It is almost a struggle to come up with two better picks than Boris and Trump, Farage maybe, but from a Putin perspective those 2 and their policies are almost perfect.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse already are LD.
Remain voting West Oxfordshire could go too but Leave voting Cherwell (the only Leave area in Oxfordshire) is still pretty solid Tory
Stodge: “Parties in Government have a duty to the whole country not just those who voted for them or for a particular policy.”
Very old-fashioned. Quaint even.
By that criterion, out of the five governments in these islands, only the ones in Dublin and Edinburgh are fulfilling their duty.
You may well be right but that's how I see it, my friend. We can't have a Government in Westminster whose sole concerns are those who voted for one option in a referendum over three years ago. It sounds absurd just writing it.
The world has moved on yet the UK seems as always stuck in the ruts of its own history.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
The small window may already be shut.
Let us assume that both of the ideal scenarios for Boris come to pass - Firstly he delivers BREXIT and Farage and co drift toward single figures or secondly having failed to deliver BREXIT in October he goes for a general election on a No Deal prospectus.
The small window might be firmly locked by the reality of economic difficulties as aspects of "Project Fear" begin to take shape and the optics become sub-optimal. Relying on the competence of this administration to steer a steady course might be considered a tad optimistic although in fairness the curse of Grayling has been lifted - a sliver of hope emerges .....
What is remarkable about Johnson’s Cabinet is that Grayling is not in it, but it is still of lower calibre than May’s dire efforts. Williamson at Education is perhaps the worst Cabinet appointment of all time, although Raab at FCO and Patel at the Home Office run it close.
Panel's tough on crime message will go down well with working class voters
Boris Johnson’s attempts to lock in the support of hardline Tory Eurosceptics suffered a serious blow last night after one of the most senior Brexiteer MPs angrily turned down a ministerial role.
In the first rift between the new prime minister and the faction that backed him for the leadership, Steve Baker told Mr Johnson that a job in the Brexit department would have left him “powerless”.
Tory Eurosceptics accused Mr Johnson of “binning off” the European Research Group of Brexiteers now that he was in power. They blamed Dominic Cummings, the former head of Vote Leave, who has been appointed the most senior adviser in Downing Street.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
It is almost a struggle to come up with two better picks than Boris and Trump, Farage maybe, but from a Putin perspective those 2 and their policies are almost perfect.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
Jeremy Corbyn would be a top pick for Vladimir Putin too. The destruction of NATO is a strategic objective and he'd effectively achieve it then without a shot being fired.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
I'm not sure people who voted for the woman who sent go home vans around the place have too much to feel high and mighty about.
You cheerfully vote for Corbyn and I note you have actually given up trying to defend his track record on antisemitism. That said, so has he.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
But Corbyn and Johnson have none.
Hmm that is strange... you made a comment about my lack of defence but I have searched your comment and can't find your defence of the racism and xenophobia you voted for?
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
I have never supported no deal rhetoric. If you have nothing to say, at least don't make things up.
And I note you still haven't addressed the main point. Don't you find it depressing that at the moment we have simple tribal mudslinging over racism, when it's eating its way into both main parties (and it's not as though the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and SNP are immune, and as for UKIP and the Faragistas...)
I'm more concerned that instead of its being addressed as a general problem that needs sorting out, it's being used in an attempt to score political points - as you are doing.
I don't think you are deeply concerned at all, you have been consistent in using it as a political weapon against Corbyn who you oppose for other reasons and now when I call you out on your own voting all of a sudden you are concerned about it being used for political point scoring?!
Not buying it.
It was May's rhetoric and you who said she was intelligent, you didn't mention economic competence though (I seemed to imagine that part...)
Are you saying I should not criticise Corbyn for his awkward issues around racism just because I also think he's a liar, a fool and a bully peddling discredited shibboleths of nineteenth century philosophers?
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
Yes, I take your point. Although I think Johnson's plan (to the extent he has one - maybe "vague aim" would be better) is for close cooperation with the EU on matters that are important to us both - he's certainly not a Cash/Redwood type radical on the subject of Europe.
Otherwise, Johnson tends to be socially quite liberal and economically right wing. Pretty much the polar opposite of the authoritarian, socially conservative Putin.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
That's certainly what I would do although the information on Mozilla is unclear. However, having done some further digging and looked at the w3c standard I believe you are correct. So this is another Vanilla issue.
As usual, a very pious posting from a LibDem ... who actually are some of the worst offenders on here.
When I said I had once voted LibDem, and would never again, I particularly remember a poster who suggested (fallaciously) that I had made up this electoral story.
That poster's name .. err, stodge.
But, this is a typical LibDem act. The bad boys & girls are the Tories and Labour and the SNP who behave like little children, while the "grown up" LibDem party is above such childishness.
The ex Tory MP for Brecon is a "crook" for minor troughing, but the LibDems caught troughing (like David Laws who makes Chris Davies look like a small time apprentice) escape all censure.
Who in the LibDems ever called David Laws a crook? Or censured him at the time?
Pious, eh, I've been called worse.
I regularly criticise my own party on its policies and what it has done and, yes, I critique some of the other parties but I lack the tunnel vision of those who think only one party is ever in the wrong and only one party never criticises its own.
You'd better believe a lot of LDs weren't happy with Laws but in truth many were happy to see him go as he was seen as the extreme end of the Orange Bookers who were ideologically perceived to be too close to Cameron's so-called "liberal conservatism".
You don't like the LDs and think we're all a bunch of hypocrites, then? Fair enough, I'll put you down as a "maybe".
If, however, I impugned you by accusing you of making up a story about having once voted Liberal Democrat, I'm happy to apologise and retract my comment. Clearly, you did once vote LD and have decided you can do so no longer. Fair enough.
And in turn, I happily agree that you are much more independent LibDem than most, and if you were on my ballot paper, the pen might hover over your name.
HYUFD might want to note that even if the Tories had been able to get all the Brexit Party votes behind them they'd have still lost to the Lib Dems. It might well be that delivering Brexit might be just as harmful to the Conservatives as it would be to business.
I note in Gloucester Podsmead the LDs beat the Tories by just 3 votes with the Brexit Party gaining 16% so your conclusion does not hold up there.
Last time Labour beat the Tories there by 30 votes, this time Labour's vote collapsed by over 30%
Though NS does not say it, one can't help wondering if Boris's praise for GMO crops is preparing us to roll over for American demands as part of an FTA.
The answer to that is obviously yes. One of the results of British parochialism is that the US dimension to the Brexit crisis tends to get overlooked. Look at connections between the Leave campaign (which has taken over the government without an election, using Johnson as its front with Cummings as CEO) and the Mercers (reclusive US billionaires who have put huge amounts of money behind data-driven political campaigns and who are so right wing they make the Koch brothers look like Jeremy Corbyn). Look at the role of Bannon. Look at Trump's broader strategy to weaken the EU, which Brexit is a key part of. This is a good account of those links: https://bylinetimes.com/2019/06/21/the-transatlantic-triumph-of-trumpism-boris-johnson-a-plan-years-in-the-making/ The irony is that a trade deal with the US probably won't get through Congress if the UK fucks Ireland in a no deal Brexit. But I expect at the UK end we will roll over and accept a terrible deal with the US if it is on offer - we will be too weakened to say no, which of course was the plan all along.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
If they didn't under May they wont under Boris.
This issue should be on merits and not on how nasty the PM is but we have seen previously they use that as an excuse not to vote to leave while claiming they want to.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
Yes, I take your point. Although I think Johnson's plan (to the extent he has one - maybe "vague aim" would be better) is for close cooperation with the EU on matters that are important to us both - he's certainly not a Cash/Redwood type radical on the subject of Europe.
Otherwise, Johnson tends to be socially quite liberal and economically right wing. Pretty much the polar opposite of the authoritarian, socially conservative Putin.
Only one thing matters to Boris Johnson and that's Boris Johnson. Everything else will be thrown to the wolves sooner or later.
Vladimir Putin won't be very interested in Boris Johnson's views anyway. He's just a useful tool.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
I think it is fair to say Boris blew his first test in the job.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
Though the BXP got a lower share than UKIP did previously. Like the Euros it was just pretending not a surge.
It would be amusing to see Casino Royale defending racism among Boris' acolytes and The Jezziah attacking it - in an exact about turn of the discussions over THAT mural - if it wasn't just deeply depressing that this is what we have come to.
Hmm that is strange... you made a comment about my lack of defence but I have searched your comment and can't find your defence of the racism and xenophobia you voted for?
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
I have never supported no deal rhetoric. If you have nothing to say, at least don't make things up.
And I note you still haven't addressed the main point. Don't you find it depressing that at the moment we have simple tribal mudslinging over racism, when it's eating its way into both main parties (and it's not as though the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and SNP are immune, and as for UKIP and the Faragistas...)
I'm more concerned that instead of its being addressed as a general problem that needs sorting out, it's being used in an attempt to score political points - as you are doing.
I don't think you are deeply concerned at all, you have been consistent in using it as a political weapon against Corbyn who you oppose for other reasons and now when I call you out on your own voting all of a sudden you are concerned about it being used for political point scoring?!
Not buying it.
It was May's rhetoric and you who said she was intelligent, you didn't mention economic competence though (I seemed to imagine that part...)
Are you saying I should not criticise Corbyn for his awkward issues around racism just because I also think he's a liar, a fool and a bully peddling discredited shibboleths of nineteenth century philosophers?
I wouldn't have engaged in multiple conversations with you If I claimed you couldn't make accusations against Corbyn, it is telling that when the tables get turned you suddenly cry about the tribal mudslinging of racism....
You can't vote for go home vans, windrush and all the other crap May was involved in, accuse you opponents of supporting racism and then get upset when they point the finger back at you.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
Brexit Party well below the 20% or so last night they were polling pre Boris.
Boris will pick up Labour Leave seats even if he loses a few to the LDs it will still be a net gain as there are more marginal Labour Leave seats than marginal Tory Remain seats.
LDs won council by elections even before the 2017 general election when they got 7%
Mainly bluster. The idea that we 'lead the world' in battery technology is utterly risible.
Boris has the typical classics educated public schoolboy knowledge and understanding of science and technology. His skills are in rhetoric and bombast, not sifting through facts.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse already are LD.
Remain voting West Oxfordshire could go too but Leave voting Cherwell (the only Leave area in Oxfordshire) is still pretty solid Tory
Cotswolds was one of the few non-metropolitan areas in the country to vote Remain.
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
The small window may already be shut.
Let us assume that both of the ideal scenarios for Boris come to pass - Firstly he delivers BREXIT and Farage and co drift toward single figures or secondly having failed to deliver BREXIT in October he goes for a general election on a No Deal prospectus.
The small window might be firmly locked by the reality of economic difficulties as aspects of "Project Fear" begin to take shape and the optics become sub-optimal. Relying on the competence of this administration to steer a steady course might be considered a tad optimistic although in fairness the curse of Grayling has been lifted - a sliver of hope emerges .....
What is remarkable about Johnson’s Cabinet is that Grayling is not in it, but it is still of lower calibre than May’s dire efforts. Williamson at Education is perhaps the worst Cabinet appointment of all time, although Raab at FCO and Patel at the Home Office run it close.
Panel's tough on crime message will go down well with working class voters
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
It is almost a struggle to come up with two better picks than Boris and Trump, Farage maybe, but from a Putin perspective those 2 and their policies are almost perfect.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
Jeremy Corbyn would be a top pick for Vladimir Putin too. The destruction of NATO is a strategic objective and he'd effectively achieve it then without a shot being fired.
TBH Corbyn will probably have little effect, even if he won a big majority I couldn't see him leaving NATO, I'm not sure it is a huge priority of his.
Whereas no deal clearly is on the Boris agenda.
Given the choice in an upcoming election Putin would almost undoubtedly favour Boris and his no deal platform winning.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
Brexit Party well below the 20% or so last night they were polling pre Boris.
Boris will pick up Labour Leave seats even if he loses a few to the LDs it will still be a net gain as there are more marginal Labour Leave seats than marginal Tory Remain seats.
LDs won council by elections even before the 2017 general election when they got 7%
Thank you, HYUFD. We were all getting a little worried for a moment.
And in turn, I happily agree that you are much more independent LibDem than most, and if you were on my ballot paper, the pen might hover over your name.
I'll take that, my friend. Have a good day and I'll rely on you to hold me to the mark.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
I can't understand much of your conversation with Edmund but I can't access any of the comments on Firefox though everything else seems normal. I'm having to access them on Chrome which is more difficult. Can either of you lend a solution?
I am expecting a fabulous summer of positioning and posturing. The Tories will be in Panto season - we're going to do no deal! Oh no you're not! Oh yes we are! Plenty of choices pf panto villain with all the people sacked now sitting on the back benches.
Labour will continue life in The Matrix - in the mistaken belief that Corbyn is Prime Minister in waiting and that they can truly understand the world around them. Not seeing that in reality they are a withered husk plugged into a machine that the Jeremy cannpt comprehend.
The LibDems will be wanting to build on their stupendous 3 vote win landslide in Gloucester yesterday - poaching sane MPs from the Panto and The Matrix being their focus.
Am I seeing things or did the Yellow Peril win both Glouceter by-elections yesterday?
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
It was also the first time the Brexit party stood, and in one seat scored over 100 votes with the Lib Dem’s winning by 3. So I’m sure that HYUFD will also explain how Boris unites the leave side and splits the remain side! Some call it the Boris effect....
I think it is fair to say Boris blew his first test in the job.
I'll get my coat...
Have a good morning.
Even Tony Blair lost council by elections before his 2001 general election re election landslide and the Tories did better last night than Labour.
I expect the next poll to show bounces for both the Boris led Tory Party and Swinson's LDs with Corbyn Labour third, maybe even 4th behind the Brexit Party in a poll in the next few weeks
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
Yes, I take your point. Although I think Johnson's plan (to the extent he has one - maybe "vague aim" would be better) is for close cooperation with the EU on matters that are important to us both - he's certainly not a Cash/Redwood type radical on the subject of Europe.
Otherwise, Johnson tends to be socially quite liberal and economically right wing. Pretty much the polar opposite of the authoritarian, socially conservative Putin.
Only one thing matters to Boris Johnson and that's Boris Johnson. Everything else will be thrown to the wolves sooner or later.
Vladimir Putin won't be very interested in Boris Johnson's views anyway. He's just a useful tool.
I'll put you down as "cautiously optimistic" about Johnson's premiership.
My original point (which you've now made also) was that Corbyn as PM would be a fantastic result for Putin. Maybe I shouldn't post at 5am - it seems I get carried away a bit.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse already are LD.
Remain voting West Oxfordshire could go too but Leave voting Cherwell (the only Leave area in Oxfordshire) is still pretty solid Tory
Cotswolds was one of the few non-metropolitan areas in the country to vote Remain.
Cotswold is full of second homes for wealthy Londoners
Mr. P, interesting tweet, if accurate (loss of Grayling, very pro-leave and pro-Boris, indicates it might be). If Boris can't even get the hardliners behind him, he's got half a faction.
Difficult to oust a PM. Not so hard to undermine one.
We know he doesn’t have the votes to get the (or his) WA through the HoC. So it looks like he’ll either play Russian roulette with Parliament, or go for a GE if forced.
There’s talk of these magical 40 Labour MPs who might somehow vote it through. They won’t materialise.
Any Labour MPs voting with Johnson would almost certainly be voting to end their political careers. A few are standing down at the next GE, though, so he could get those. Hoey is a given.
Is everyone left in the PLP so browbeaten, resigned or unambitious that they can't muster another challenge to Corbyn?
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
If we were basking upon the sunlit uplands of post-Brexit Britain and if that pesky Farage and his party were forever banished to the isle of Elba then your post might be valid.
While I share your low opinion of most of the cabinet, particularly Williamson and Patel, Raab at the FCO is a different kettle of fish. He has years of experience working at the FCO in the New Labour era, indeed a CV which suits a SJW, including human rights activism, working for the ICC, Liberty and even Palestinian government. From Wikipedia:
"After leaving Cambridge, Raab worked at Linklaters in London, completing his two-year training contract at the firm and then leaving shortly after qualifying as a solicitor in 2000. Whilst at Linklaters he worked on project finance, international litigation and competition law. This included time on secondments at Liberty (the human rights NGO) and in Brussels advising on EU and WTO law.[15][third-party source needed] He spent the summer of 1998 at Birzeit University near Ramallah, Palestine's de facto capital on the West Bank, where he worked for one of the principal Palestinian negotiators of the Oslo peace accords, assessing World Bank projects on the West Bank.
Raab joined the Foreign Office in 2000, covering a range of briefs including leading a team at the British Embassy in The Hague, dedicated to bringing war criminals to justice. After returning to London, he advised on the Arab–Israeli conflict, the European Union, and Gibraltar. "
I know reverse grids are fabricated for excitement, but in a series like F3, where cars are much more similar than in F1, it really gives a good indication of who the good drivers are.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
It is almost a struggle to come up with two better picks than Boris and Trump, Farage maybe, but from a Putin perspective those 2 and their policies are almost perfect.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
Jeremy Corbyn would be a top pick for Vladimir Putin too. The destruction of NATO is a strategic objective and he'd effectively achieve it then without a shot being fired.
TBH Corbyn will probably have little effect, even if he won a big majority I couldn't see him leaving NATO, I'm not sure it is a huge priority of his.
Whereas no deal clearly is on the Boris agenda.
Given the choice in an upcoming election Putin would almost undoubtedly favour Boris and his no deal platform winning.
If, say, Estonia is invaded by Russia at a time when Britain's Prime Minister is Jeremy Corbyn, do you think Britain would send troops to honour its NATO Article 5 obligations?
You're turning to Paul Staines for reputable journalism?
Well codswallop has had to apologize yet again, so in this case it appears he is correct. At this rate, she will surpass the dodgy doctor Eoin in terms of apologies / corrections per month.
You're turning to Paul Staines for reputable journalism?
Well codswallop has had to apologize yet again, so in this case it appears he is correct.
I don't know. Staines has been completely wrong about her so many times I no longer read him. And I don't take any note of what he says. He's descended into a nasty rabid right-wing thug who pedals half-baked stories.
Mr. Jessop, I watched most of a race (think I stumbled across it when I had time to kill).
It was interesting but very little overtaking (hard to say if that was due to the circuit) and, of course, much slower than F1. I still think it's going to do more harm than good, though.
You're turning to Paul Staines for reputable journalism?
Well codswallop has had to apologize yet again, so in this case it appears he is correct.
I don't know. Staines has been completely wrong about her so many times I no longer read him. And I don't take any note of what he says. He's descended into a nasty rabid right-wing thug who pedals half-baked stories.
I figure it would be easier just to list the far right groups that don't like Boris... Just have to find one first.
If I was accustomed to giving credence to such arguments, I'd point out that Putin will presumably be unutterably furious at Johnson's elevation, but would be delighted should he be replaced by your friend from Islington.
On what is your presumption based?
Salisbury.
1) Boris Johnson doesn't care about Salisbury. He cares so little that he ducked out of a Cobra briefing on the subject to be photographed resigning.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
It is almost a struggle to come up with two better picks than Boris and Trump, Farage maybe, but from a Putin perspective those 2 and their policies are almost perfect.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
Jeremy Corbyn would be a top pick for Vladimir Putin too. The destruction of NATO is a strategic objective and he'd effectively achieve it then without a shot being fired.
TBH Corbyn will probably have little effect, even if he won a big majority I couldn't see him leaving NATO, I'm not sure it is a huge priority of his.
Whereas no deal clearly is on the Boris agenda.
Given the choice in an upcoming election Putin would almost undoubtedly favour Boris and his no deal platform winning.
If, say, Estonia is invaded by Russia at a time when Britain's Prime Minister is Jeremy Corbyn, do you think Britain would send troops
It's possible Corbyn could send troops but I think Putin will be able to manage on his own.
I've got something similar here, not working in Chrome, although Firefox is OK. Been this way for a week or two.
I can still see the embedded tweets in Firefox, though.
These are the errors I'm getting - apparently Chrome is applying a content security policy and thinks it's not allowed to load the iframe from vanilla, but I can't see anything in the headers or the source code that sets that, so I guess it's just a setting that Chrome made up.
Looking at those headers and doing some digging, the policy is not being made up by Chrome. The response from Vanilla that contains the comments has a header which includes the directive "Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors 'self' www2.politicalbetting.com *politicalbetting.com". That tells the browser that it should only embed the comments in a page from the same source as the comments (i.e. politicalbetting.vanillacommunity.com) or from any domain ending politicalbetting.com. The www2.politicalbetting.com bit of the directive is actually redundant because that will also match *politicalbetting.com. So it appears that Chrome thinks the main page is not from politicalbetting.com but from some other domain. Strange.
Off the top of my head (am on mobile, on holiday) I doubt *politicalbetting.com is valid. It should presumably be *.politicalbetting.com, i.e. with a dot to denote subdomain.
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse already are LD.
Remain voting West Oxfordshire could go too but Leave voting Cherwell (the only Leave area in Oxfordshire) is still pretty solid Tory
Cotswolds was one of the few non-metropolitan areas in the country to vote Remain.
Cotswold is full of second homes for wealthy Londoners
The scum!
Seriously, it's mostly Cirencester, isn't it? Nearby Stroud is also similarly remainy.
You're turning to Paul Staines for reputable journalism?
Well codswallop has had to apologize yet again, so in this case it appears he is correct.
I don't know. Staines has been completely wrong about her so many times I no longer read him. And I don't take any note of what he says. He's descended into a nasty rabid right-wing thug who pedals half-baked stories.
But she apologised. Whatever one thinks of Staines, who obviously is no objective source, her apology shows she was wrong. Ignoring her own apology because of Staines seems a peculiar thing to do. You aren't ignoring what he says, you're ignoring what she said.
Even people we dislike or who are awful can occasionally be right.
Comments
I’m going to work. Have a good day.
PS: I am sure Gloucester is a very nice place.
The problem is less who we are voting for than the awfulness of the choice facing us. May at least had redeeming features - determination, intelligence and an ability to construct a vaguely coherent sentence. That's why I felt able to vote for her despite misgivings over some of her policies, especially as Labour had put forward a fantasy that would, if they even tried to implement it, have caused economic and social meltdown.
But Corbyn and Johnson have none.
https://twitter.com/greenslader/status/1154304486195830784?s=21
That is why, although I would agree with you about not taking parish (sic) council by-elections too seriously, I would say this is yet another indication of something rather strange going on. The Liberal Democrats should not be winning in Gloucester, especially not this bit, if it is business as usual.
Johnson has banked on an immediate bounce and that any significant electoral surge for the LDs will damage Labour MP numbers. Under FPTP this will enhance seat numbers for the Tories. The LDs excitement at knocking Labour into third in terms of vote share still leaves us with Johnson.
Johnson can only be pegged back from his 35% voteshare landslide in two ways. A stronger-Corbyn-free Labour leading the charge or mass defections to the LDs by Corbyn-fearng Labour MPs. They need to get off their sorry rumps and do one or tge other.
It speaks volumes too that good people on the Tory side like Grieve are so tribal they too feel they have to stay with the Party and hold their noses. I suspect many, many Tory voters opposed to Johnson will do the same.
At present Johnson looks invincible, all the stars have aligned for a small window at least.
This is the problem generally and it's a big problem on here at the moment.
The tit-for-tat knockabout where a pro-Labour poster has a go at the Conservatives and vice versa and everyone piles in on the LDs is tedious, time wasting pointless piffle. Too many on here do that - big up their own side, attack the other sides and walk away thinking they've contributed.
No, a million times no and it's the same for those who criticise everyone. Relentless negativity about everyone is as tedious as relentless negativity about one side and relentless positivity about another side.
The truly interesting posts and posters are those who dare to critique their own side and praise the opposition side. Genuine insight comes from recognising what your side is doing wrong and what the other side is doing right. Taking that insight and saying it out loud in a forum like this is a step.
To fail to see the mote in one's own eye is as bad as claiming there's only a beam. Shutting down by bluster genuine scrutiny and criticism of your own side by your own side is authoritarian and ultimately counter-productive.
Democracy works when people realise one side doesn't have all the answers or that one minority, or even a majority, are the only group that matters when it comes to policy setting. Parties in Government have a duty to the whole country not just those who voted for them or for a particular policy.
Genuine question.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2211206-awkward-truths-about-boris-johnsons-praise-for-uk-science-and-tech/
Though NS does not say it, one can't help wondering if Boris's praise for GMO crops is preparing us to roll over for American demands as part of an FTA.
Being a little hypocritical are we?
Also I can understand why the no deal rhetoric would sound like intelligence and economic competence to a certain kind of person, just not an intelligent or economically competent one.
Nothing to do with technical problems, but I’m just curious as to why PB is absent from FB? Just seems a bit old-fashioned to be invisible there.
When I said I had once voted LibDem, and would never again, I particularly remember a poster who suggested (fallaciously) that I had made up this electoral story.
That poster's name .. err, stodge.
But, this is a typical LibDem act. The bad boys & girls are the Tories and Labour and the SNP who behave like little children, while the "grown up" LibDem party is above such childishness.
The ex Tory MP for Brecon is a "crook" for minor troughing, but the LibDems caught troughing (like David Laws who makes Chris Davies look like a small time apprentice) escape all censure.
Who in the LibDems ever called David Laws a crook? Or censured him at the time?
Let us assume that both of the ideal scenarios for Boris come to pass - Firstly he delivers BREXIT and Farage and co drift toward single figures or secondly having failed to deliver BREXIT in October he goes for a general election on a No Deal prospectus.
The small window might be firmly locked by the reality of economic difficulties as aspects of "Project Fear" begin to take shape and the optics become sub-optimal. Relying on the competence of this administration to steer a steady course might be considered a tad optimistic although in fairness the curse of Grayling has been lifted - a sliver of hope emerges .....
And I note you still haven't addressed the main point. Don't you find it depressing that at the moment we have simple tribal mudslinging over racism, when it's eating its way into both main parties (and it's not as though the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and SNP are immune, and as for UKIP and the Faragistas...)
I'm more concerned that instead of its being addressed as a general problem that needs sorting out, it's being used in an attempt to score political points - as you are doing.
Which should bar him from Parliament for terminal stupidity, frankly.
Very old-fashioned. Quaint even.
By that criterion, out of the five governments in these islands, only the ones in Dublin and Edinburgh are fulfilling their duty.
Not buying it.
It was May's rhetoric and you who said she was intelligent, you didn't mention economic competence though (I seemed to imagine that part...)
Very interesting Gloucestershire comments. I’m keeping a particular eye on Cotswold as it borders my area (West Oxfordshire) and is similar politically - indeed the two are outsourcing partners. It’s possible, even likely, WODC will fall to NOC next time.
Lot's of spluttering by the hapless Malthouse. A small sliver of Achilles Heel showing. Like UKIP it's easy to forget the Tories now have their own nutters. Not least Johnson himself.
Edited extra bit: still think the 10 each way (fifth the odds top three) on Verstappen in qualifying is worth considering.
2) In the grand scheme of things, Salisbury doesn't matter much to Vladimir Putin anyway. His main strategic aim in Europe is to foment chaos and disorder, so he can divide and rule. Boris Johnson is an ideal choice from that perspective.
I regularly criticise my own party on its policies and what it has done and, yes, I critique some of the other parties but I lack the tunnel vision of those who think only one party is ever in the wrong and only one party never criticises its own.
You'd better believe a lot of LDs weren't happy with Laws but in truth many were happy to see him go as he was seen as the extreme end of the Orange Bookers who were ideologically perceived to be too close to Cameron's so-called "liberal conservatism".
You don't like the LDs and think we're all a bunch of hypocrites, then? Fair enough, I'll put you down as a "maybe".
If, however, I impugned you by accusing you of making up a story about having once voted Liberal Democrat, I'm happy to apologise and retract my comment. Clearly, you did once vote LD and have decided you can do so no longer. Fair enough.
It isn't for nothing that Putin seems to go for populist right wing Eurosceptic parties, the pattern repeats over a few countries.
Remain voting West Oxfordshire could go too but Leave voting Cherwell (the only Leave area in Oxfordshire) is still pretty solid Tory
The world has moved on yet the UK seems as always stuck in the ruts of its own history.
In 2017 the English and Welsh Sun backed the Tories while the Scottish Sun backed the SNP.
The Sun also backed Blair 3 times, the Sun is the only national UK paper to have endorsed the winner at every UK general election since 1979
Otherwise, Johnson tends to be socially quite liberal and economically right wing. Pretty much the polar opposite of the authoritarian, socially conservative Putin.
Is so, when will HYUFD be along to explain how this demonstrates the Boris bounce?
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1154327521762185216
Although still preferable to the alternative!
*To a certain standard
Last time Labour beat the Tories there by 30 votes, this time Labour's vote collapsed by over 30%
This is a good account of those links:
https://bylinetimes.com/2019/06/21/the-transatlantic-triumph-of-trumpism-boris-johnson-a-plan-years-in-the-making/
The irony is that a trade deal with the US probably won't get through Congress if the UK fucks Ireland in a no deal Brexit. But I expect at the UK end we will roll over and accept a terrible deal with the US if it is on offer - we will be too weakened to say no, which of course was the plan all along.
The idea that we 'lead the world' in battery technology is utterly risible.
This issue should be on merits and not on how nasty the PM is but we have seen previously they use that as an excuse not to vote to leave while claiming they want to.
Vladimir Putin won't be very interested in Boris Johnson's views anyway. He's just a useful tool.
I'll get my coat...
Have a good morning.
You can't vote for go home vans, windrush and all the other crap May was involved in, accuse you opponents of supporting racism and then get upset when they point the finger back at you.
https://order-order.com/2019/07/26/caroles-cadwalladrs-latest-miscarriage-justice/
What a clown
Boris will pick up Labour Leave seats even if he loses a few to the LDs it will still be a net gain as there are more marginal Labour Leave seats than marginal Tory Remain seats.
LDs won council by elections even before the 2017 general election when they got 7%
Whereas no deal clearly is on the Boris agenda.
Given the choice in an upcoming election Putin would almost undoubtedly favour Boris and his no deal platform winning.
https://order-order.com/2019/07/26/caroles-cadwalladrs-latest-miscarriage-justice/
Labour will continue life in The Matrix - in the mistaken belief that Corbyn is Prime Minister in waiting and that they can truly understand the world around them. Not seeing that in reality they are a withered husk plugged into a machine that the Jeremy cannpt comprehend.
The LibDems will be wanting to build on their stupendous 3 vote win landslide in Gloucester yesterday - poaching sane MPs from the Panto and The Matrix being their focus.
I expect the next poll to show bounces for both the Boris led Tory Party and Swinson's LDs with Corbyn Labour third, maybe even 4th behind the Brexit Party in a poll in the next few weeks
My original point (which you've now made also) was that Corbyn as PM would be a fantastic result for Putin. Maybe I shouldn't post at 5am - it seems I get carried away a bit.
We are not and it isn’t.
While I share your low opinion of most of the cabinet, particularly Williamson and Patel, Raab at the FCO is a different kettle of fish. He has years of experience working at the FCO in the New Labour era, indeed a CV which suits a SJW, including human rights activism, working for the ICC, Liberty and even Palestinian government. From Wikipedia:
"After leaving Cambridge, Raab worked at Linklaters in London, completing his two-year training contract at the firm and then leaving shortly after qualifying as a solicitor in 2000. Whilst at Linklaters he worked on project finance, international litigation and competition law. This included time on secondments at Liberty (the human rights NGO) and in Brussels advising on EU and WTO law.[15][third-party source needed] He spent the summer of 1998 at Birzeit University near Ramallah, Palestine's de facto capital on the West Bank, where he worked for one of the principal Palestinian negotiators of the Oslo peace accords, assessing World Bank projects on the West Bank.
Raab joined the Foreign Office in 2000, covering a range of briefs including leading a team at the British Embassy in The Hague, dedicated to bringing war criminals to justice. After returning to London, he advised on the Arab–Israeli conflict, the European Union, and Gibraltar. "
It's well worth a watch if you have a spare half-hour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgD50_J3ig
I know reverse grids are fabricated for excitement, but in a series like F3, where cars are much more similar than in F1, it really gives a good indication of who the good drivers are.
You're turning to Paul Staines for reputable journalism?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/25/isnt-government-campaign-team-determined-scare-parliament-compliance/
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-right-s-anger-over-dominic-cummings-job-as-senior-aide-to-johnson-75k5m69n9
It was interesting but very little overtaking (hard to say if that was due to the circuit) and, of course, much slower than F1. I still think it's going to do more harm than good, though.
Seriously, it's mostly Cirencester, isn't it? Nearby Stroud is also similarly remainy.
Must be something in the water.
Even people we dislike or who are awful can occasionally be right.