Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Should the time arrive when Putin decides to invade Western Europe, our nuclear strike capability won't be what puts him off. It is all down to what Uncle Sam does next, and if Putin has a friendly face in the Whitehouse, happy to undermine Nato, and quite content for Putin to fill his boots, I suspect should the desire take him, the ground forces move in.
If Boris struggles with making decisions about more mundane issues like when to time a lockdown, he will be overwhelmed by all the letters he has to write to himself if he is called to command a nuclear strike.
On the contrary - his record of writing two opposing letters on critical issues will be sure to keep the enemy guessing.
"Does my letter say 'Ah, just let it go!' or 'Turn everything west of the Urals into glass'? The real question, Vladimir, is 'Do you feel lucky?' Well, do ya, панк?"
As for what would actually happen in that scenario, we can't control the US, but 200 British warheads is more than enough to ruin anyone's day...
I am not sure you understand the implications of Johnson having to ask Putin 'if he feels lucky'. It won't just be just the West of the Urals that will look like a moonscape.
Yes, that's the whole point of the word 'mutually' in 'mutually-assured destruction'. Neither side wants to end up living on the moon as a fine layer of ash, so they never put themselves in a situation that would produce that conclusion.
So as Russian ground forces pick off each European Country one by one, and President Trump, enjoying his second term, but otherwise occupied by a racially based civil war, does nothing about it. The ball is in Boris' court, does he launch a nuclear first strike?
At least he would have the choice, as would Macron.
In such a scenario Putin would have overrun most of the rest of western Europe with Russian forces, he would only hesitate about France and the UK which both have nuclear weapons
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
The Tories had a 5 to 8% lead in the polls last night, so would still be at least tied, plus don't assume all the Brexit Party votes would come from the Tories.
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
What better way to get the tories to do what you want? its worked before.
THis isn;t about Europe. Farage senses people are more appalled about the authorities' response to BLM than is being reported. They are very angry.
Cue a whole load of speeches in the Featherstones and the Newports about the tory betrayal of our traditions blah blah blah
Cue a rise in the polls.
Cue tory panic.
Remember when the Tories used to bang on about Labour being steered from Moscow?
Well, now it’s the Tories being steered from Berlin. Old Berlin. By a new apostle.
When are the Tories going to grow a pair and tell Farage and his storm troopers to go away and copulate?
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
Why would he? Of all the dictators the world has had they haven't all wanted world domination. Admittedly the ones that have had, have been a bit of a pain.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
Until 1997 the Tories needed to win London as, along with the Midlands, it was the key swing region in the country, almost always voting for the party which won the general election.
Now however London is the safest Labour region in the UK, as 2019 showed even less of a prospect for the Tories than the North of England and Wales, so the Tories do not need to win London to win a general election outside a few seats mostly in the suburbs.
Indeed despite a UK wide majority of 80 the Tories now only hold 3 seats in the whole of inner London, Cities of London and Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Fulham and 2/3 of those are marginal seats
That’s a slippery slope. Imagine if the SNP had taken a similar attitude to the impenetrable Labour fortresses of the Central Belt during the 1990s and 2000s. We would have failed to slowly but steadily build up our bases in dozens of Labour seats with immense majorities. Those tough, thankless decades of hard slog and preparation made the eventual breakthrough possible. It did not happen overnight.
Sounds to me like the Tories have simply given up on London. Unwise.
That is a slightly different matter, the SNP needed to win most of the Central Belt to get a majority in Scotland. Hence Scotland shifted from a Labour to SNP majority from 2007 to 2015 as the SNP started to win Labour seats in the Central Belt.
As 2019 showed the Tories do not need to win most of London to get a UK wide majority
I’ll take that as a yes: the Tories have simply given up on London.
Beeb reports that 'A man has been arrested on suspicion of urinating on the Westminster memorial dedicated to PC Keith Palmer.'
I'll bet he wishes he'd kept it in his trousers!
Edit. Apparently he had the good grace to 'present himself at a police station'
Interesting the elision between “on” and “next to”.
The man seems an idiot, but I would be surprised if what he did was deliberate. I suspect he didn’t see the memorial.
If he was trying to urinate on it he had remarkably bad aim.
He had a bladder full of lager and he thought he could piss wherever he liked. There is no way he did it deliberately by the memorial to PC Palmer, but he certainly did it openly in the street and did not give it a second thought. It's a minor infraction, but it is perfect in its symbolism. He was there to protect traditional British values.
Presumably rather a lot of people have been urinating in the streets, as there aren't any public toilets open.
Back in the 50's a common Sunday evening sight on the road from Southend to London was a coach parked in a lay-by and a line of men urinating in the hedge.
There is a line in the King James Bible - 1 Kings 14, to be exact - that describes the offences of the Kings of Israel as being comparable to ‘them that pisseth against a wall.’
It makes no sense until you realise it was an idiomatic phrase for lower class people.
I see that the proposed KJV solution involves "cutting off".
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
What better way to get the tories to do what you want? its worked before.
THis isn;t about Europe. Farage senses people are more appalled about the authorities' response to BLM than is being reported. They are very angry.
Cue a whole load of speeches in the Featherstones and the Newports about the tory betrayal of our traditions blah blah blah
Cue a rise in the polls.
Cue tory panic.
Remember when the Tories used to bang on about Labour being steered from Moscow?
Well, now it’s the Tories being steered from Berlin. Old Berlin. By a new apostle.
When are the Tories going to grow a pair and tell Farage and his storm troopers to go away and copulate?
Good point.
Trouble is, this government has shown itself to be very open to political intimidation,. And Farage is the biggest heavy of them all.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
Nah
''A man who is tired of London, sir, is tired of life'
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
The Tories had a 5 to 8% lead in the polls last night, so would still be at least tied, plus don't assume all the Brexit Party votes would come from the Tories.
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
Brexit is not “done”. Brexit will never be “done”, because you failed to build a solid case and you failed to take people with you.
Brexit will be “done” when it works in people’s interests and is seen to be working in people’s interests. Which is never.
The only way Brexit will ever be “done” is when England finally re-joins. Which she will. When she finally realises that she is just another normal country among many others.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
I think it is a real possibility that lots of middle income / middle class folk leave. Bigger homes, less crime, lower pollution living are all available for those that can WFH and currently live in London.
We aren't a big country, you can easily live as far as Cardiff way and commute to London for 1-2 days a week.
The question is, is the void filled by even more young folk, leading to vibrant energized city, lots of start-ups etc. Doubt it will go Detroit way, but certainly be heavily impacted by loss of middle band of people and not replaced.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
Russia has lots of oil too and the world is slowly moving away from oil.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
At least he would have the choice, as would Macron.
In such a scenario Putin would have overrun most of the rest of western Europe with Russian forces, he would only hesitate about France and the UK which both have nuclear weapons
Putin isn't ideological nor is he Peter the Great. He is a Russian nationalist (nothing wrong with that in Russia) but I don't see any sign he wants to conquer Poland, Germany, Slovakia or anywhere else.
Capitalism keeps the peace and it works for the most part pretty well. Yes, you have the ideological threats like North Korea and Islamic fundamentalism but both Russia and China, while a long way from being democracies by any measure, aren't what they were. Those in or close to power enjoy the trappings of wealth, the finer things of life - why risk it all?
There's an older saying if you are busy making money you're too busy to make trouble.
Just an aside from that to the weekend's events - Mrs Stodge has opined the protesters on both sides were people on furlough who were bored with nothing to do. There may be a germ of truth in that, I'm not sure.
The capacity to incite and cause violence is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of power and influence held.
To be blunt, protest is a signal of futility and failure - both the anti-war march and the Countryside Alliance march which were far in excess of anything we've seen recently and which were, as I recall, peaceful protests but both failed to persuade the Government of the day to change its view as did the pro-EU marches of recent times.
That's not to say there shouldn't be a right to peaceful protest - as @NickPalmer mentioned, a dignified protest can on occasion give decision makers pause for reflection and consideration and that's reasonable but no democratic Government of any stripe can be seen to be "taking the knee" (so to speak) to the demands of the mob because that's where democracy dies.
"To add to the tale of woe, the Government has forgone the opportunity to extend the transition out of Europe’s single market. I’m assuming that ministers are not so cynical as to hope that any further economic damage from a no-deal Brexit gets lost in the aftermath of coronavirus devastation."
As i predicted yesterday, pissy man has now become the media face of the protests.
I thought we couldn't see his face.
Perhaps we should say he's become the most prominent arse of the protests?
I think by tomorrow we will see his face all over the front pages and by Tuesday if he has a job, be out of it.
The 28-year-old was arrested on suspicion of outraging public decency and is currently in custody in Essex after presenting himself at a police station.
I hadn't thought about until now, but where have all the other protestors been going to the toilet? No public toilets, cafes, pubs, restaurants etc to pay a visit to.
Still, at least we got the only one to go up a wall prosecuted
I wonder if Farage is going to repeat the same non-transparent funding trick with TBP that he pulled off last time?
System working well, send more money.
He has no intention of launching the party; it’s just the hook he has to deploy to get into the media.
He's an attention whore who's no longer got LBC.
British politics is littered with the corpses of those who dismissed Nigel Farage.
Its really not.
Wonder if David Cameron would agree. How did he dismiss UKIP again?
As the fruitcakes, nuts and loons that they were.
Cameron's failure was because he didn't control his own party. The reason there was a referendum wasn't UKIP, it was that nearly a hundred of his own MPs demanded it - pressure he couldn't resist. The reason he lost the referendum isn't due to fruitcakes, nuts and loons - it is because a majority of the country voted for the campaign led by Cameron's colleagues like - oh who was it who led Vote Leave - oh yes, Boris Johnson.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
I think it is a real possibility that lots of middle income / middle class folk leave. Bigger homes, less crime, lower pollution living are all available for those that can WFH and currently live in London.
They will do but that is no bad thing for London, for one it always happens that people live cities for suburbs and rural life as they raise a family, two it should bring house prices and rents more in line with earnings. There are a significant number of people who are only still in London as their house has earnt them more than their job over the last 25 years and they expect that to continue. If its clear that isnt the case a lot will cash in.
His great achievement was to get himself infected.
Of course its easy to know why people think Whitty has done well - people always say that medicos have done well because they want to believe that medicos have done well.
The consequences of thinking medicos are a bit rubbish are too unsettling for most people.
"To add to the tale of woe, the Government has forgone the opportunity to extend the transition out of Europe’s single market. I’m assuming that ministers are not so cynical as to hope that any further economic damage from a no-deal Brexit gets lost in the aftermath of coronavirus devastation."
Only if you are a zealot remainer. Boris was elected to get us out of the EU.. why would he want to prevaricate. its the EU who want the extension, well they can F OFF. (and I was a remainer, I voted to stay in.) That fight is lost. Time to get out asap. The EU will be fecked without a deal.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
If that was the case every western city would become like Detroit, including New York and Paris.
The rich and middle class all moving to the suburbs and countryside
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
I wonder if Farage is going to repeat the same non-transparent funding trick with TBP that he pulled off last time?
System working well, send more money.
He has no intention of launching the party; it’s just the hook he has to deploy to get into the media.
He's an attention whore who's no longer got LBC.
British politics is littered with the corpses of those who dismissed Nigel Farage.
Its really not.
Wonder if David Cameron would agree. How did he dismiss UKIP again?
As the fruitcakes, nuts and loons that they were.
Cameron's failure was because he didn't control his own party. The reason there was a referendum wasn't UKIP, it was that nearly a hundred of his own MPs demanded it - pressure he couldn't resist. The reason he lost the referendum isn't due to fruitcakes, nuts and loons - it is because a majority of the country voted for the campaign led by Cameron's colleagues like - oh who was it who led Vote Leave - oh yes, Boris Johnson.
Well true but those MPs were only demanding it because of pressure they could not resist.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
No, Putin is merely an autocratic bully. He needs the West to be a threat for his own internal control purposes. He only invades countries where there is a pro Russian community, and enfeebled government.
There simply is, probably for the first time in our history, a credible conventional military threat to the United Kingdom. Counter insurgency, anti terrorism and expeditionary warfare as part of an alliance are all that our forces will fight in the foreseeable future.
His great achievement was to get himself infected.
Of course its easy to know why people think Whitty has done well - people always say that medicos have done well because they want to believe that medicos have done well.
The consequences of thinking medicos are a bit rubbish are too unsettling for most people.
I like the way he speaks, its clear, authoritative, informed and confident. Thats probably true of most doctors to be fair. Im not really qualified to judge his contribution beyond that.
His great achievement was to get himself infected.
Of course its easy to know why people think Whitty has done well - people always say that medicos have done well because they want to believe that medicos have done well.
The consequences of thinking medicos are a bit rubbish are too unsettling for most people.
It's like the old joke:
Q. What you do call the person who graduates bottom of their medical class?
A: Doctor.
p.s. I like Chris Whitty. He is calm, cuddly, and ugly in a very English way.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
Until 1997 the Tories needed to win London as, along with the Midlands, it was the key swing region in the country, almost always voting for the party which won the general election.
Now however London is the safest Labour region in the UK, as 2019 showed even less of a prospect for the Tories than the North of England and Wales, so the Tories do not need to win London to win a general election outside a few seats mostly in the suburbs.
Indeed despite a UK wide majority of 80 the Tories now only hold 3 seats in the whole of inner London, Cities of London and Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Fulham and 2/3 of those are marginal seats
That’s a slippery slope. Imagine if the SNP had taken a similar attitude to the impenetrable Labour fortresses of the Central Belt during the 1990s and 2000s. We would have failed to slowly but steadily build up our bases in dozens of Labour seats with immense majorities. Those tough, thankless decades of hard slog and preparation made the eventual breakthrough possible. It did not happen overnight.
Sounds to me like the Tories have simply given up on London. Unwise.
That is a slightly different matter, the SNP needed to win most of the Central Belt to get a majority in Scotland. Hence Scotland shifted from a Labour to SNP majority from 2007 to 2015 as the SNP started to win Labour seats in the Central Belt.
As 2019 showed the Tories do not need to win most of London to get a UK wide majority
I’ll take that as a yes: the Tories have simply given up on London.
London is about as important to the Tories as the Scottish Borders are to the SNP, even now most Scottish Borders MPs are Tory despite the SNP majority across Scotland, just as most London MPs are Labour despite the Tory majority across the UK
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
Until 1997 the Tories needed to win London as, along with the Midlands, it was the key swing region in the country, almost always voting for the party which won the general election.
Now however London is the safest Labour region in the UK, as 2019 showed even less of a prospect for the Tories than the North of England and Wales, so the Tories do not need to win London to win a general election outside a few seats mostly in the suburbs.
Indeed despite a UK wide majority of 80 the Tories now only hold 3 seats in the whole of inner London, Cities of London and Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Fulham and 2/3 of those are marginal seats
That’s a slippery slope. Imagine if the SNP had taken a similar attitude to the impenetrable Labour fortresses of the Central Belt during the 1990s and 2000s. We would have failed to slowly but steadily build up our bases in dozens of Labour seats with immense majorities. Those tough, thankless decades of hard slog and preparation made the eventual breakthrough possible. It did not happen overnight.
Sounds to me like the Tories have simply given up on London. Unwise.
That is a slightly different matter, the SNP needed to win most of the Central Belt to get a majority in Scotland. Hence Scotland shifted from a Labour to SNP majority from 2007 to 2015 as the SNP started to win Labour seats in the Central Belt.
As 2019 showed the Tories do not need to win most of London to get a UK wide majority
I’ll take that as a yes: the Tories have simply given up on London.
London is about as important to the Tories as the Scottish Borders are to the SNP, even now most Scottish borders MPs are Tory despite the SNP majority across Scotland, just as most London MPs are Labour despite the Tory majority across the UK
A telling indictment of how our voting system allows parties to take significant parts of the country for granted.
Why is Shaun Bailey regarded as ineffective by some?
Just speaking for myself - I find him intellectually lightweight and also shallow and shifty.
Lightweight is the term that first comes to mind whenever I hear him. IanB2 (I think) provides a précis of his career achievements to date down thread. Precis of the précis: sweet FA.
Having said that - and given what a hopeless gig this would be for any Tory - I’d say he’s the ideal candidate for them. What you don’t want is a potentially stronger candidate losing any political capital they already have from the inevitably humiliating defeat. Let Shaun take this one for the team.
You say that - and yes it's probably right - but imo Khan is far from a political giant and is beatable if the Cons could find a really strong candidate. Being in any sense a Conservative is a no no, therefore if I were them I would be looking for a charismatic independent to run primarily as themselves with the Con badge just peeping out from under the lapel very occasionally and only in safe spaces.
Rory Stewart?
He would be a better Con candidate but would still lose imo. He's known as a Tory which I think is fatal in London.
I more meant an Alan Sugar type who is the very antithesis of Alan Sugar - if they can find such a person.
Sugar would be a complete disaster as a candidate. He is far too thin-skinned.
God yes. Just the thought is absurd. No, they need to find an anti-Sugar. An entrepreneur who is free of reactionary views and is animated by a spirit of public service (having now made their money) rather than ego and spotlight. Bill Gates springs to mind as a template. A "London Bill Gates" would beat Sadiq Khan imo.
So who are the potential 'London Bill Gates' ?
As I remember Cameron initially wanted Greg Dyke to be the anti-Ken candidate in 2008.
I don't know but my mental image is of a working class cockney made good, in their 40s, wealth accrued from a business that genuinely adds value, such as high end manufacturing or tech-with-a-purpose, as opposed to froth like - well, I'm sure you know what I mean by that.
Will need a record of speaking up on issues such as racism and sexism and environmental damage - and preferably being anti those things rather than for them - but not in a way that has really got up people's noses in places like Bromley.
The USP, and this is what will allow the Cons to choose this person, will be a belief in "tough love", rather than subsidy and feather bedding, and in "looking beyond race and gender" rather than wallowing in victimhood.
When I picture the individual, I see Ray Winstone for some reason, but that is just a superficial thing that means nothing. Because of course it could be a woman.
Agreed, that's the job specs.
But who are the possible applicants ?
I suspect that's why Alan Sugar is well thought of in some circles - he's the nearest the average person would think of as a British tech billionaire. That he dates back to the 1980s surely reveals something.
Apart from him there's the 'chain store entrepreneur' image the Conservatives like - echoes from the Thatcher era perhaps ?
Sugar with the 'reactionary old geezer' gene removed would perhaps fit the bill. Of course that would no longer be Sugar. As for a chain store entrepreneur, I fear they have been badly tarnished by recent scandals. That business seems to be full of wrong uns. Who else? I really don't know. Guess there probably isn't anybody. It remains a dream. And therefore London remains a Labour city.
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
The Tories had a 5 to 8% lead in the polls last night, so would still be at least tied, plus don't assume all the Brexit Party votes would come from the Tories.
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
Brexit is not “done”. Brexit will never be “done”, because you failed to build a solid case and you failed to take people with you.
Brexit will be “done” when it works in people’s interests and is seen to be working in people’s interests. Which is never.
The only way Brexit will ever be “done” is when England finally re-joins. Which she will. When she finally realises that she is just another normal country among many others.
Brexit was done in January when we left the EU as 52% voted for in the 2016 referendum, it was the people who voted for it.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
I think it is a real possibility that lots of middle income / middle class folk leave. Bigger homes, less crime, lower pollution living are all available for those that can WFH and currently live in London.
They will do but that is no bad thing for London, for one it always happens that people live cities for suburbs and rural life as they raise a family, two it should bring house prices and rents more in line with earnings. There are a significant number of people who are only still in London as their house has earnt them more than their job over the last 25 years and they expect that to continue. If its clear that isnt the case a lot will cash in.
In normal times yes, because you have a large number of people just waiting to replace them. What happens if we don't, because we still can't have normal social lives etc.
Detroit had this problem, all the good job went, the middle class left and no new influx of people.
I don't think London will be new-Detroit, but it isn't a given that London will carry on as normal, especially if no vaccine for a significant period of time.
Many more people might WFH, so never need to move to London in the first place. We are seeing a bit of this in the US, some big tech firms saying you can live where ever you like and work remotely. I believe Wordpress has been like this for years, but Facebook getting onboard now.
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
Until 1997 the Tories needed to win London as, along with the Midlands, it was the key swing region in the country, almost always voting for the party which won the general election.
Now however London is the safest Labour region in the UK, as 2019 showed even less of a prospect for the Tories than the North of England and Wales, so the Tories do not need to win London to win a general election outside a few seats mostly in the suburbs.
Indeed despite a UK wide majority of 80 the Tories now only hold 3 seats in the whole of inner London, Cities of London and Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Fulham and 2/3 of those are marginal seats
That’s a slippery slope. Imagine if the SNP had taken a similar attitude to the impenetrable Labour fortresses of the Central Belt during the 1990s and 2000s. We would have failed to slowly but steadily build up our bases in dozens of Labour seats with immense majorities. Those tough, thankless decades of hard slog and preparation made the eventual breakthrough possible. It did not happen overnight.
Sounds to me like the Tories have simply given up on London. Unwise.
That is a slightly different matter, the SNP needed to win most of the Central Belt to get a majority in Scotland. Hence Scotland shifted from a Labour to SNP majority from 2007 to 2015 as the SNP started to win Labour seats in the Central Belt.
As 2019 showed the Tories do not need to win most of London to get a UK wide majority
I’ll take that as a yes: the Tories have simply given up on London.
London is about as important to the Tories as the Scottish Borders are to the SNP, even now most Scottish borders MPs are Tory despite the SNP majority across Scotland, just as most London MPs are Labour despite the Tory majority across the UK
A telling indictment of how our voting system allows parties to take significant parts of the country for granted.
I'm not sure the Tories haven't given up on Scotland, in view of the current polling and their performance with Brexit etc. Mr Mundell very nearly got his jotters 2 or 3 elections back.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
On a scale of zero to Johnson-refusing-to-pay-for-an-abortion how likely do you think it will be that Russia will think invading and occupying the UK is worth the cost over the 30 year life of the Dreadnought boats?
When it comes to nuclear defence, I quite like the probability of danger to be at you-obeying-the-speed-limit levels.
I don't believe that Putin wants to invade Western Europe - indeed I find the prospect prepostrous. However, that's not why I think we should offload Trident. The primary reason is that I don't believe it's a genuine deterrent. We know that the USA could withdraw their support at any time and cripple the programme in weeks. I suspect they also have the technical ability to stop it in a more immediate timeframe. And I suspect they would do so if we got into a nuclear fight with Russia - to avoid a worldwide nuclear winter. If we had a homegrown nuclear programme and we had a piece of it rented out to Australia, would we have no failsafe mechanism to stop them blowing up the Chinese? Tactical nuclear weapons with a panoply of delivery mechanisms, known and unknown, are far less prectictable and therefore scarier.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
If that was the case every western city would become like Detroit, including New York and Paris.
The rich and middle class all moving to the suburbs and countryside
Is it time to move to Milton Keynes?
The subject of so much mockery over the decades is apparently the perfect post-Covid city
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
I think it is a real possibility that lots of middle income / middle class folk leave. Bigger homes, less crime, lower pollution living are all available for those that can WFH and currently live in London.
We aren't a big country, you can easily live as far as Cardiff way and commute to London for 1-2 days a week.
The question is, is the void filled by even more young folk, leading to vibrant energized city, lots of start-ups etc. Doubt it will go Detroit way, but certainly be heavily impacted by loss of middle band of people and not replaced.
I've been saying for years that there are far more 'cockney' accents*, generally in working class jobs, in Yorkshire than there were a generation ago.
We might get to see their middle class equivalents.
* Don't know if the 'cockney' accents were genuine Londoners or more general south-east types.
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
The Tories had a 5 to 8% lead in the polls last night, so would still be at least tied, plus don't assume all the Brexit Party votes would come from the Tories.
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
Brexit is not “done”. Brexit will never be “done”, because you failed to build a solid case and you failed to take people with you.
Brexit will be “done” when it works in people’s interests and is seen to be working in people’s interests. Which is never.
The only way Brexit will ever be “done” is when England finally re-joins. Which she will. When she finally realises that she is just another normal country among many others.
Brexit was done in January when we left the EU as 52% voted for in the 2016 referendum, it was the people who voted for it.
Most 'normal' countries are not in the EU
Most normal countries aren't in Europe with their biggest markets in Europe!!
Your point makes no sense. If a million people turned up on a march in London and 0.1% were violent it would be open warfare on the streets and there is no way it would be described as 'largely peaceful'. There was violence at both demos and both should be condemned equally. Everything else is just seeking to justify your own bias.
I agree, but there is an objective problem with the way the media (and indeed popular interest) work: if you want attention, you need to do something illegal - pull down a statue, start a fight, start a fire, etc. There was a large, completely silent BLM march this week in Brighton, which got almost zero publicity. So protestors draw the sadly correct conclusion that if they behave themselves they will be ignored.
I think it would be helpful if fringe groups who cause trouble got minimal attention apart from the police dealing with them. Likewise terrorists, for that matter. Publicity for evil attention-seekers simply rewards them. Obviously there comes a point that so much havoc is caused that one can't ignore it. But a few thousand people shouting a lot and throwing beer cans? We don't need to know.
There is clearly a problem with the media today exactly as you describe and one that needs to be addressed and resolved. It is not a left/right or state/libertarian issue. It is a straight forward issue of chasing ratings through sensationalism. It is worst in the television media but is present in all types of journalism.
There is a good example causing an argument in Belgium at the moment where an RTBF TV crew prearranged with some youths to turn up to film them attacking a statue of Leopold II. Now if ever a statue needed to be removed it is that of Leopold II but TV crews should not be pre arranging meetings to film criminal activity. It comes dangerously close to incitement.
I have it on excellent (family) authority that Press encouragment of similar violence took place at football matches in the 80's.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
I wonder if Farage is going to repeat the same non-transparent funding trick with TBP that he pulled off last time?
System working well, send more money.
He has no intention of launching the party; it’s just the hook he has to deploy to get into the media.
He's an attention whore who's no longer got LBC.
British politics is littered with the corpses of those who dismissed Nigel Farage.
Its really not.
Wonder if David Cameron would agree. How did he dismiss UKIP again?
As the fruitcakes, nuts and loons that they were.
Cameron's failure was because he didn't control his own party. The reason there was a referendum wasn't UKIP, it was that nearly a hundred of his own MPs demanded it - pressure he couldn't resist. The reason he lost the referendum isn't due to fruitcakes, nuts and loons - it is because a majority of the country voted for the campaign led by Cameron's colleagues like - oh who was it who led Vote Leave - oh yes, Boris Johnson.
Well true but those MPs were only demanding it because of pressure they could not resist.
Pressure from UKIP.
No, those MPs were demanding it because they wanted it. They were Eurosceptics. That's why they campaigned for Brexit too. The majority of the Tory backbenchers rebelled, 81 rebels and 15 more abstained that was nearly 100 Eurosceptic rebels.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
Very odd how BBC missed this despite being all over social media and Sky edited it so you only saw the guy getting treatment, no context.
I fear it will be used as a rallying call by the far right ramble rousers.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
Armed with stuff like this, Farage's mob would once again be the enormous draw they were in the old industrial towns of England and Wales before Brexit.
They;d be on 10% again before you could say Nick Griffin.
Tis is why we are leaving without a transition, because its who the tories really fear.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
Why? Even Hitler had a logical (if barking) reason for invading Russia. Why would Putin want to invade Western Europe?
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
rediscover our national discourse with ourselves
Belfast with haggis.
Hutton, Black, Smith, Watt, Hume, Ferguson, Maclaurin, Monboddo,Macpherson, and Boswell say hello (posthumously).
Your point makes no sense. If a million people turned up on a march in London and 0.1% were violent it would be open warfare on the streets and there is no way it would be described as 'largely peaceful'. There was violence at both demos and both should be condemned equally. Everything else is just seeking to justify your own bias.
I agree, but there is an objective problem with the way the media (and indeed popular interest) work: if you want attention, you need to do something illegal - pull down a statue, start a fight, start a fire, etc. There was a large, completely silent BLM march this week in Brighton, which got almost zero publicity. So protestors draw the sadly correct conclusion that if they behave themselves they will be ignored.
I think it would be helpful if fringe groups who cause trouble got minimal attention apart from the police dealing with them. Likewise terrorists, for that matter. Publicity for evil attention-seekers simply rewards them. Obviously there comes a point that so much havoc is caused that one can't ignore it. But a few thousand people shouting a lot and throwing beer cans? We don't need to know.
There is clearly a problem with the media today exactly as you describe and one that needs to be addressed and resolved. It is not a left/right or state/libertarian issue. It is a straight forward issue of chasing ratings through sensationalism. It is worst in the television media but is present in all types of journalism.
There is a good example causing an argument in Belgium at the moment where an RTBF TV crew prearranged with some youths to turn up to film them attacking a statue of Leopold II. Now if ever a statue needed to be removed it is that of Leopold II but TV crews should not be pre arranging meetings to film criminal activity. It comes dangerously close to incitement.
I have it on excellent (family) authority that Press encouragment of similar violence took place at football matches in the 80's.
How will GE 2024 turn out if a new UKIP/Brexit Party or similar takes 5% of the vote? Unevenly spread, that will cause total havoc for the Tories in many seats.
The Tories had a 5 to 8% lead in the polls last night, so would still be at least tied, plus don't assume all the Brexit Party votes would come from the Tories.
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
Brexit is not “done”. Brexit will never be “done”, because you failed to build a solid case and you failed to take people with you.
Brexit will be “done” when it works in people’s interests and is seen to be working in people’s interests. Which is never.
The only way Brexit will ever be “done” is when England finally re-joins. Which she will. When she finally realises that she is just another normal country among many others.
The great irony is that without the 13 Conservative MPs returned by Scotland in 2017, Theresa May would never have been able to stay in power, Boris wouldn't have been able to become PM, and Brexit might never have happened at all.
The Brexiteers truly owe Scotland an eternal debt of gratitude - they literally couldn't have done it without you.
I wonder if Farage is going to repeat the same non-transparent funding trick with TBP that he pulled off last time?
System working well, send more money.
He has no intention of launching the party; it’s just the hook he has to deploy to get into the media.
He's an attention whore who's no longer got LBC.
British politics is littered with the corpses of those who dismissed Nigel Farage.
Its really not.
Every single Remoaner?
The referendum was not won by Farage alone. Had Farage been the prime face of the Leave campaign then Remain would have won.
Without Farage's political skills, guiding UKIP from total irrelevance to Very Real Menace - pressuring the Tories - the Tory leadership would never have allowed a referendum.
Without Farage, no Brexit. This is inarguable fact. You are becoming quite dim.
It wasn;t so long ago that the BP were on 28% in the polls with May's tories on 17.
Armed with a story of the ultimate betrayal, added to a much harder line on BLM and their cohorts. and the BP would tear through the towns of England like wildfire
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
What's in it for Russia? The Baltic states maybe. (Mind you, I could never work out why the Nazis attacked Western Europe either. To quote Ken Livingstone, I think Hitler might have gone a bit mad.)
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
rediscover our national discourse with ourselves
Belfast with haggis.
Hutton, Black, Smith, Watt, Hume, Ferguson, Maclaurin, Monboddo,Macpherson, and Boswell say hello (posthumously).
He's chucked money around, who is going to hate him for that?
so did Gordon Brown and he's incredibly disliked. It's not just the spending money, it's the ability to deal with the media, do straight talking and show compassion. He has a skillset that is superior to Boris and Starmer.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
The far right still after their Horst Wessel moment I see.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
On a scale of zero to Johnson-refusing-to-pay-for-an-abortion how likely do you think it will be that Russia will think invading and occupying the UK is worth the cost over the 30 year life of the Dreadnought boats?
When it comes to nuclear defence, I quite like the probability of danger to be at you-obeying-the-speed-limit levels.
I don't believe that Putin wants to invade Western Europe - indeed I find the prospect prepostrous. However, that's not why I think we should offload Trident. The primary reason is that I don't believe it's a genuine deterrent. We know that the USA could withdraw their support at any time and cripple the programme in weeks. I suspect they also have the technical ability to stop it in a more immediate timeframe. And I suspect they would do so if we got into a nuclear fight with Russia - to avoid a worldwide nuclear winter. If we had a homegrown nuclear programme and we had a piece of it rented out to Australia, would we have no failsafe mechanism to stop them blowing up the Chinese? Tactical nuclear weapons with a panoply of delivery mechanisms, known and unknown, are far less prectictable and therefore scarier.
I don't know about weeks but the UK could not sustain the Trident program without US technical support. Unlike the French Navy the RN has no ability to deguass hulls, no range to test missiles and no instrumented range ship. ( The French range ship is the unfortunately named Monge.)
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
Your point makes no sense. If a million people turned up on a march in London and 0.1% were violent it would be open warfare on the streets and there is no way it would be described as 'largely peaceful'. There was violence at both demos and both should be condemned equally. Everything else is just seeking to justify your own bias.
I agree, but there is an objective problem with the way the media (and indeed popular interest) work: if you want attention, you need to do something illegal - pull down a statue, start a fight, start a fire, etc. There was a large, completely silent BLM march this week in Brighton, which got almost zero publicity. So protestors draw the sadly correct conclusion that if they behave themselves they will be ignored.
I think it would be helpful if fringe groups who cause trouble got minimal attention apart from the police dealing with them. Likewise terrorists, for that matter. Publicity for evil attention-seekers simply rewards them. Obviously there comes a point that so much havoc is caused that one can't ignore it. But a few thousand people shouting a lot and throwing beer cans? We don't need to know.
There is clearly a problem with the media today exactly as you describe and one that needs to be addressed and resolved. It is not a left/right or state/libertarian issue. It is a straight forward issue of chasing ratings through sensationalism. It is worst in the television media but is present in all types of journalism.
There is a good example causing an argument in Belgium at the moment where an RTBF TV crew prearranged with some youths to turn up to film them attacking a statue of Leopold II. Now if ever a statue needed to be removed it is that of Leopold II but TV crews should not be pre arranging meetings to film criminal activity. It comes dangerously close to incitement.
I have it on excellent (family) authority that Press encouragment of similar violence took place at football matches in the 80's.
There was a going rate for stone throwing at soldiers in NI during the troubles.
There is a story that on one occasion an officer approached a film crew, who'd been paying for stone throwing.
He asked them for money for his men - since they were paying one side like actors, he felt it only fair that the chaps receiving the stones got something as well...
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
Why? Even Hitler had a logical (if barking) reason for invading Russia. Why would Putin want to invade Western Europe?
It is far wealthier than Russia but now with smaller armed forces
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
Very odd how BBC missed this despite being all over social media and Sky edited it so you only saw the guy getting treatment, no context.
I fear it will be used as a rallying call by the far right ramble rousers.
I rather like "ramble rousers"
Right, let's all get out there, and go for a REALLY LONG HIKE ACROSS THE CHILTERNS!
What do we want? A THERMOS! How do we want it? TARTAN!
LOL... If only the news was back on ramble rousers....those militant ones demanding historic rights of ways opened up. Those were innocent days.
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
rediscover our national discourse with ourselves
Belfast with haggis.
Hutton, Black, Smith, Watt, Hume, Ferguson, Maclaurin, Monboddo,Macpherson, and Boswell say hello (posthumously).
today its Frankie Boyle debates drinking meths with Peter Wishart
We were discussing the 18th century. Of course the gents are demised. But all you could do is to come out with the second rather nasty and irrelevant comment in almost as many moments.
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
You're an embarrassing xenophobe aren't you? If I were the SNP choosing between two candidates for director of communications I'd choose MalcG 100 times over you.
On Trump, the old clips you see of him, he is far more fluent speaker. Now could just be that they are the "highlights" and he definitely still had some elements of the weird ticks he has, but these days it is just weird. Even reading off prepared script, he ad libs a load of extra unnecessary or weird shit in there. Its like he can't help but verbalise his inner monologue.
People aren't protesting against Churchill because of he was bros with Mussolini, or that he gassed Kurds or had the army shoot Welsh miners it's because he's a conspicuous symbol of the British establishment and what Mao called, The Four Olds. It's just the vibe rather than anything he did in particular.
Yes, I think there is an element of kicking against Britain's maudlin obsession with poppyism.
The English obsession with WW2 is truly baffling to me. The only other country that comes close in this regard in my experience is Russia.
NA BERLIN!!!!
England has a lot in common with Russia, and indeed Turkey. Removed from the European mainstream, increasingly in thrall to nostalgic nationalism, can't admit to crimes committed during its imperial era, leader playing on nationalist grievances, educated middle class increasingly isolated and accused of lacking sufficient patriotism.
No we are more like Switzerland or Norway, seeking to play a part in Europe without being subsumed into a half-baked superstate.
As for admitting the crimes of our Imperial era, our record glows in comparison to France's.
This Swiss/Norway option sounds fantastic. Why aren't we having it after December 31st?
The EU wouldn't offer us the Swiss option. They hate it.
Alternatively, our political leaders, being Tories, are not very good at negotiating. Or making friends. Or winning people over.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
They were attempted murder. They use bottles, fists and boots, 20 or 30 against 1. A furious crowd can kill a man very quickly, like that, even if no individual is actually set on killing the victim.
Basic criminology.
Only the fact the police were so close and so quick saved these guys.
Once again, the police were the heroes of yesterday. I salute them.
I have a feeling if the far right mob had been filmed doing that to a black kid, the focus wouldn't be on pissy man.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
Russia has lots of oil too and the world is slowly moving away from oil.
Some analysts suggested, even before COVID, that oil use and growth had already decoupled. So that economic growth was no longer leading to more oil use.
This will accelerate - so you will have falling oil use with growth.
I wonder if Farage is going to repeat the same non-transparent funding trick with TBP that he pulled off last time?
System working well, send more money.
He has no intention of launching the party; it’s just the hook he has to deploy to get into the media.
He's an attention whore who's no longer got LBC.
British politics is littered with the corpses of those who dismissed Nigel Farage.
Its really not.
Every single Remoaner?
The referendum was not won by Farage alone. Had Farage been the prime face of the Leave campaign then Remain would have won.
Without Farage's political skills, guiding UKIP from total irrelevance to Very Real Menace - pressuring the Tories - the Tory leadership would never have allowed a referendum.
Without Farage, no Brexit. This is inarguable fact. You are becoming quite dim.
The Eurosceptics were within the Tories before Farage was even known about. Redwood, Cash, IDS, Davis etc were all around before Farage.
I don't think it's likely that the Tories win London no matter the candidate. This being the case, Sean Bailey should get full support, the Tories should fight tooth and nail for every vote, and just use it as a learning exercise.
Shaun Bailey is not a basket case just yet. There have been five London Mayoral elections. Labour won two of them. Just two. Not even half. CCHQ needs to grow a pair and stop this endless whinging that "the system" is biased against them in Scotland, Wales, London, the north.
Indeed. If the Tories presented an attractive platform, and were fronted by likeable, competent, normal people, they would perform well electorally among Londoners, Scots, Welsh and northern English.
“The system” is heavily in their favour, so their lack of success must be down to their ugly agenda, their repulsive character, their gross and increasingly obvious incompetence, and the fact that most of their high profile figures are complete weirdos.
Winning elections is not rocket science. You just need to be reasonably ok, not the best on the planet. That’s why all Johnson’s guff about his “world-beating” policies backfires. It is so self-evidently untrue. Johnson is not the best person in the building, let alone the planet.
Just wait till the Brexit post cognitive dissonance kicks in. Then we’ll see how “the system” affects the Tory vote in the English Midlands and South.
That's a fair point about hyperbole.
Do people really want 'world beating' ? Its usually hard work and very costly.
Being good enough is usually good enough.
I think the hyperbole can trace its origins to the English public school system and/or to Oxbridge, where most senior Tories seem to have been educated. (And the ones who weren’t educated there would desperately have loved to, and thus ape their “betters”.)
There is an unattractive culture of bragging which permeates English culture. I don’t think they realise they’re doing it, but it is a defining national characteristic for folk with a bit of perspective from furth of England’s green and pleasant land.
It can work in various ways - Cameron had the mixture of smooth style with arrogance and insecurity beneath while Boris is a lazy frother.
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Touché! 😀
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
rediscover our national discourse with ourselves
Belfast with haggis.
Hutton, Black, Smith, Watt, Hume, Ferguson, Maclaurin, Monboddo,Macpherson, and Boswell say hello (posthumously).
today its Frankie Boyle debates drinking meths with Peter Wishart
We were discussing the 18th century. Of course the gents are demised. But all you could do is to come out with the second rather nasty and irrelevant comment in almost as many moments.
you've spent most of the last week denigrating people from the C18, I thought youd rather discuss the present.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
They were attempted murder. They use bottles, fists and boots, 20 or 30 against 1. A furious crowd can kill a man very quickly, like that, even if no individual is actually set on killing the victim.
Basic criminology.
Only the fact the police were so close and so quick saved these guys.
Once again, the police were the heroes of yesterday. I salute them.
I have a feeling if the far right mob had been filmed doing that to a black kid, the focus wouldn't be on pissy man.
Don't you think?!
Mind you, excellent policing to get the only person to have a piss where they shouldn't since this all started.
Sadiq Khan is an uninspiring mayor. I don't think he has done anything much to deserve a second term, but neither has he done anything particularly catastrophic. He doesn't have the power to. My guess is that he will win whoever the Tories put up against him because right now London does not like the Conservative party very much.
Why should we like them? They don't like us, except for our money.
Absolutely. The Tories have decided that one of the ways to remain in power is to paint London as one of the many enemies this country has. A lot of people in London have noticed that.
London won't have any money by the time this plague is finished with us.
Drive around the city, you can already see the decay. It will only accelerate: as people work from home, offices empty, restaurants, shops and bars close down. A chain reaction of collapse then follows, as the rich flee, the tax take falls, taxes then rise to compensate, and then the middle class follow the rich. Crime intensifies...
London could be an English Detroit.
If that was the case every western city would become like Detroit, including New York and Paris.
The rich and middle class all moving to the suburbs and countryside
Indeed that is possible: I foresee dark times for all western megacities, unless we get a good vaccine.
London, NYC and Paris would be at the top of the list, in terms of likely decline. NYC and Paris were ALREADY shrinking in population before the virus.
If I had to predict a course for London, it wouldn't be Detroit (I was being colourful) it would be New York in the 70s.
There is an upside to this: New York in the 70s became so rundown and cheap property in the middle was easy to buy, which attracted young arty types back into the city, NYC became creative and edgy and fun (albeit violent) and so the cycle of decline was slowly reversed, as gentrification surged.
But that's a long way in the future, and only possible. Short and medium term decay is very probable
Why not London in the Seventies? With working from home, retrenchment in the finance industry, rising unemployment, racial tension on the rise, it all sounds quite familiar to me. Middle class flight to the suburbs and leave London to the Droogs and ultraviolence.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
They were attempted murder. They use bottles, fists and boots, 20 or 30 against 1. A furious crowd can kill a man very quickly, like that, even if no individual is actually set on killing the victim.
Basic criminology.
Only the fact the police were so close and so quick saved these guys.
Once again, the police were the heroes of yesterday. I salute them.
I have a feeling if the far right mob had been filmed doing that to a black kid, the focus wouldn't be on pissy man.
Don't you think?!
Mind you, excellent policing to get the only person to have a piss where they shouldn't since this all started.
Which would all be useless if having given up Trident Putin decided to invade us and we could do little to stop him.
Why doesn't Putin invade Sweden next weekend?
Because he's calculated it's not worth the cost. For now.
But if a country has second-strike nuclear capability, then invading it will never be worth the cost.
Simples.
Simples? Really? What about him not having any interest whatsoever in doing so?
I'm no fan of Putin, but I don't think he is sitting there weighing up the odds on which countries to invade.
I suspect the only ones that comes to mind are ones where there is an historic relationship.
British/English exceptionalism is psychologically incapable of accepting that the UK just isn't really worth invading. Getting rid of Trident would be an admission of irrelevance too far.
We are still a top 10 global economy and as a Scot you should know we have lots of oil too.
Of course we are worth invading by the leader of a poorer country with a stronger military like Putin
I assume this is tongue in cheek HYUFD. You don't really think Putin is sitting there with a box of pins and a map thinking who it is worth invading and who he can get away with invading do you?
The UK is not an ex Soviet Union or satellite state. Luxembourg looks a bit tasty shall we have a go at them?
Putin is essentially a dictator, if he could get away with it he would annexe most of western Europe to Russia
Why? Even Hitler had a logical (if barking) reason for invading Russia. Why would Putin want to invade Western Europe?
It is far wealthier than Russia but now with smaller armed forces
One thing that many people don't understand about Russia is the mythology of the Soviet Union that Putin and other nationalists promote -
- There is no Ukrainian language, just a dialect of Russian - Ukraine isn't a real country - All the countries that were part of the Soviet Union were really Russian. - Everyone in such countries were really happier when the Russians were in control. - Eastern Europe should be controlled by Russia by right.
etc. etc. getting ever more extreme as you go further and further off the scale.
The parallels with other Imperialisms are striking.
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
They were attempted murder. They use bottles, fists and boots, 20 or 30 against 1. A furious crowd can kill a man very quickly, like that, even if no individual is actually set on killing the victim.
Basic criminology.
Only the fact the police were so close and so quick saved these guys.
Once again, the police were the heroes of yesterday. I salute them.
I have a feeling if the far right mob had been filmed doing that to a black kid, the focus wouldn't be on pissy man.
Don't you think?!
Mind you, excellent policing to get the only person to have a piss where they shouldn't since this all started.
He handed himself in apparently.
Well yes. His face being plastered all over the internet probably gave him a nudge.
It is all panning out almost exactly as predicted. I wont hold my breath for the acknowledgements
Feral gangs, hunting down whites and beating them because they are white.
But yes, let's all go mad about the guy taking a misplaced leak
Note that the first video has had one MILLION views, so the attempt by the MSM to ignore this is not working, it is merely proving thatKonstantin Kisin is right yet again: this is precisely what he predicts in the NEXT stage: people will notice the bias and get even angrier
If we counted the posts about the two sets of incidents on here, the condemnations of the fighting would outnumber the condemnation of the pissing by many times. I dont think anyone has suggested the pisser should get more than a fine. Whereas the assaults have been misrepresented as stabbings and attempted murder.
They were attempted murder. They use bottles, fists and boots, 20 or 30 against 1. A furious crowd can kill a man very quickly, like that, even if no individual is actually set on killing the victim.
Basic criminology.
Only the fact the police were so close and so quick saved these guys.
Once again, the police were the heroes of yesterday. I salute them.
I have a feeling if the far right mob had been filmed doing that to a black kid, the focus wouldn't be on pissy man.
Don't you think?!
Mind you, excellent policing to get the only person to have a piss where they shouldn't since this all started.
He wasn't the only one, judging from photos I've seen, including a saturated entrance lobby to a branch of a chain chemist.
Comments
There is much 'knucklehead energy' to be stoked and exploited.
In such a scenario Putin would have overrun most of the rest of western Europe with Russian forces, he would only hesitate about France and the UK which both have nuclear weapons
In any case now Brexit is done and provided free movement is ended the BXP will do far less damage to Boris than they did to May
Well, now it’s the Tories being steered from Berlin. Old Berlin. By a new apostle.
When are the Tories going to grow a pair and tell Farage and his storm troopers to go away and copulate?
Though nostalgia boasting happens in many countries - Edinburgh's 'fifty men of genius' for example. Were those fifty men of genius ever named ?
Good point.
Trouble is, this government has shown itself to be very open to political intimidation,. And Farage is the biggest heavy of them all.
https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1270711808312016897?s=20
Pissy man is going to get the book thrown at him and all media spotlight is going to be on him for days.
''A man who is tired of London, sir, is tired of life'
Dr Johnson
But other English cities could.
Brexit will be “done” when it works in people’s interests and is seen to be working in people’s interests. Which is never.
The only way Brexit will ever be “done” is when England finally re-joins. Which she will. When she finally realises that she is just another normal country among many others.
We aren't a big country, you can easily live as far as Cardiff way and commute to London for 1-2 days a week.
The question is, is the void filled by even more young folk, leading to vibrant energized city, lots of start-ups etc. Doubt it will go Detroit way, but certainly be heavily impacted by loss of middle band of people and not replaced.
Capitalism keeps the peace and it works for the most part pretty well. Yes, you have the ideological threats like North Korea and Islamic fundamentalism but both Russia and China, while a long way from being democracies by any measure, aren't what they were. Those in or close to power enjoy the trappings of wealth, the finer things of life - why risk it all?
There's an older saying if you are busy making money you're too busy to make trouble.
Just an aside from that to the weekend's events - Mrs Stodge has opined the protesters on both sides were people on furlough who were bored with nothing to do. There may be a germ of truth in that, I'm not sure.
The capacity to incite and cause violence is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of power and influence held.
To be blunt, protest is a signal of futility and failure - both the anti-war march and the Countryside Alliance march which were far in excess of anything we've seen recently and which were, as I recall, peaceful protests but both failed to persuade the Government of the day to change its view as did the pro-EU marches of recent times.
That's not to say there shouldn't be a right to peaceful protest - as @NickPalmer mentioned, a dignified protest can on occasion give decision makers pause for reflection and consideration and that's reasonable but no democratic Government of any stripe can be seen to be "taking the knee" (so to speak) to the demands of the mob because that's where democracy dies.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/06/14/unbalanced-britain-needs-tax-cuts-revive-weakened-economy/
Pure comedy gold.
Still, at least we got the only one to go up a wall prosecuted
Cameron's failure was because he didn't control his own party. The reason there was a referendum wasn't UKIP, it was that nearly a hundred of his own MPs demanded it - pressure he couldn't resist. The reason he lost the referendum isn't due to fruitcakes, nuts and loons - it is because a majority of the country voted for the campaign led by Cameron's colleagues like - oh who was it who led Vote Leave - oh yes, Boris Johnson.
His great achievement was to get himself infected.
Of course its easy to know why people think Whitty has done well - people always say that medicos have done well because they want to believe that medicos have done well.
The consequences of thinking medicos are a bit rubbish are too unsettling for most people.
Difficult second album is how to manage the economy post lockdown.
The rich and middle class all moving to the suburbs and countryside
Any nation can periodically show a bit of pride and hubris, even the beloved Scots.
In our defence, all that English media turns us into blowhards too. One of the great benefits of independence will be the opportunity for us to rediscover our national discourse with ourselves. Everybody needs some Me Time.
Pressure from UKIP.
Q. What you do call the person who graduates bottom of their medical class?
A: Doctor.
p.s. I like Chris Whitty. He is calm, cuddly, and ugly in a very English way.
Most 'normal' countries are not in the EU
Detroit had this problem, all the good job went, the middle class left and no new influx of people.
I don't think London will be new-Detroit, but it isn't a given that London will carry on as normal, especially if no vaccine for a significant period of time.
Many more people might WFH, so never need to move to London in the first place. We are seeing a bit of this in the US, some big tech firms saying you can live where ever you like and work remotely. I believe Wordpress has been like this for years, but Facebook getting onboard now.
Belfast with haggis.
The subject of so much mockery over the decades is apparently the perfect post-Covid city
https://unherd.com/2020/06/why-we-love-to-hate-milton-keynes/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3
We might get to see their middle class equivalents.
* Don't know if the 'cockney' accents were genuine Londoners or more general south-east types.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/24/david-cameron-tory-rebellion-europe
At this point UKIP were on just 5-6% of the vote in Opinion Polls. They weren't even relevant to or mentioned in the story.
I fear it will be used as a rallying call by the far right ramble rousers.
They;d be on 10% again before you could say Nick Griffin.
Tis is why we are leaving without a transition, because its who the tories really fear.
Andrzej Duda says LGBT 'ideology' worse than communism
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53039864
This is quite nice -
https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/free-content/voltaire-versus-lord-kames-and-the-need-for-a-soundbite/
A grown up Labour Party is finally returning.
The Brexiteers truly owe Scotland an eternal debt of gratitude - they literally couldn't have done it without you.
Armed with a story of the ultimate betrayal, added to a much harder line on BLM and their cohorts. and the BP would tear through the towns of England like wildfire
This time for good.
today its Frankie Boyle debates drinking meths with Peter Wishart
Does anybody in the country, regardless of ethnicity not know somebody who has died?
There is a story that on one occasion an officer approached a film crew, who'd been paying for stone throwing.
He asked them for money for his men - since they were paying one side like actors, he felt it only fair that the chaps receiving the stones got something as well...
https://twitter.com/TrinityResists/status/1271981413105950720?s=20
How about this - looks like Starmer's dancing to the Tory tune on law and order:
https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1272070448394764288
Some of the party faithful are not totally thrilled though
https://twitter.com/Shugshooter/status/1272126414419083265
This will accelerate - so you will have falling oil use with growth.
Do people who big up the far right and spread their racist propaganda usually believe in far right ideas?
Or is it more likely to be trolling?
Mind you, excellent policing to get the only person to have a piss where they shouldn't since this all started.
- There is no Ukrainian language, just a dialect of Russian
- Ukraine isn't a real country
- All the countries that were part of the Soviet Union were really Russian.
- Everyone in such countries were really happier when the Russians were in control.
- Eastern Europe should be controlled by Russia by right.
etc. etc. getting ever more extreme as you go further and further off the scale.
The parallels with other Imperialisms are striking.
It is all panning out almost exactly as predicted. I wont hold my breath for the acknowledgements