No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Did you miss PMQs?
I missed it. What happened? Your verdict?
Starmer fluffed it, Johnson had an answer to everything.
Q1 Starmer "you're blaming care home workers" A1 Johnson "I take full responsibility, I praise care workers" Q2-Q5 Starmer "you're blaming care workers" A2-A5 Johnson "I've already said I'm praising care workers, you're proceeding with your prescripted questions" Q6 Starmer "Why are you abolishing free parking for NHS staff" A6 Johnson "We are offering free parking for NHS and as per our manifesto commitment are looking to expand that to patients too"
That can’t be right. David Schneider has tweeted about the govt scrapping free parking and being hypocrites. It’s got lots of,likes and retweets so must be true.
I know you're being sarcastic but it is easy to get stuck in the Twitter bubble, as I have done in the past.
Our new infection rates have been trending down for weeks, now, yet our death rate continues to tick along at modestly stable levels - it is odd that we haven’t yet seen the significant falling away of death rates that we see in Spain and Italy.
On the face of it this makes no sense. The prevalence of the virus now seems low in most of the country, new cases to deaths ratio is all out of kilter, and it gets stranger when you take into account the fact that the hospital numbers still appear to be drifting slowly downwards - suggesting that an ever-increasing proportion of the new deaths being reported are happening in elderly care homes or private residences.
Absent a proper breakdown of the figures, which means that one is necessarily guessing, I'm just wondering if a lot of the "new" deaths that are still trickling into the statistics now are historic fatalities that might have happened in April or May, but haven't been reported for months because the system for doing so is useless?
That seems to be the only explanation which makes sense given new cases have been averaging under 2000 throughout June which should have led to deaths at under 20 per day by now.
I wonder how many 'old' deaths they are now attributing to covid which were then put down to other causes originally.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Ironic given that most of the parking charges in hospital car parks came in as part of the PFI contracts signed under new labour who get away with it to this day.
One of their poor policies and something they should have abolished before they left office. I am happy to admit they got it wrong.
All credit to you for,that. I just find it ironic the deluge of crap on twitter from labour supporters, especially new labour sorts, savaging the govt over this when this was Labour’s fault in the first place and the govt have gone some way to,right this wrong. But then the govts media management is atrocious.
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Did you miss PMQs?
I missed it. What happened? Your verdict?
Starmer fluffed it, Johnson had an answer to everything.
Q1 Starmer "you're blaming care home workers" A1 Johnson "I take full responsibility, I praise care workers" Q2-Q5 Starmer "you're blaming care workers" A2-A5 Johnson "I've already said I'm praising care workers, you're proceeding with your prescripted questions" Q6 Starmer "Why are you abolishing free parking for NHS staff" A6 Johnson "We are offering free parking for NHS and as per our manifesto commitment are looking to expand that to patients too"
That can’t be right. David Schneider has tweeted about the govt scrapping free parking and being hypocrites. It’s got lots of,likes and retweets so must be true.
I know you're being sarcastic but it is easy to get stuck in the Twitter bubble, as I have done in the past.
As indeed have I, and you are right. That,is what I am mocking.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
We want to emphasise that there are lots of people who continue to have symptoms long after they are no longer infectious - this is an area of huge importance, and one that our researchers are very keen to understand better
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
They won't call it EEA. We will have a bespoke agreement like the Swiss. We are keeping free movement though. Too many Brexiteers have woken up to the double trouble of can't retire to Spain and can't find people to do work in jobs we don't want. It won't be called free movement.
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Did you miss PMQs?
I missed it. What happened? Your verdict?
Starmer fluffed it, Johnson had an answer to everything.
Q1 Starmer "you're blaming care home workers" A1 Johnson "I take full responsibility, I praise care workers" Q2-Q5 Starmer "you're blaming care workers" A2-A5 Johnson "I've already said I'm praising care workers, you're proceeding with your prescripted questions" Q6 Starmer "Why are you abolishing free parking for NHS staff" A6 Johnson "We are offering free parking for NHS and as per our manifesto commitment are looking to expand that to patients too"
Starmer did do a bit of a Jeff Astle at the 1970 World Cup, but as we Baggies know everyone has an off day and King Jeff will always be a legend.
Besides which, the takeaway from PMQs will be Johnson refusing to apologise to care home workers, so no harm done.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
The economy won't revive until people feel confident enough to go out to shop, eat and drink. Currently, people are reasonable confident they won't catch the virus outside - hence packed beaches, parks and scenes of street drinking. But many people are fearful of doing inside activities - shops, restaurants, inside pubs - because they are not confident that they won't catch the virus there. The exception may be the young (e.g. under 40s), but there's not enough of them, and they don't have enough money, to revive the economy or on their own.
So to return to normal economic activity, people need to be confident that the disease is under control. They are not yet. Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high, and people know that the track, trace isolate system is not working fully yet.
When Anneliese Dodds was criticised for talking about the virus in response to Sunak, this is what she was getting at. Confidence that the virus is under control is a prerequisite to a return to normal activity, and this government can't yet give us that confidence because they have not been very good at managing the pandemic.
So despite Sunak's exhortations and bribes, we'll only revive the economy when people are reasonably confident that the virus is not omnipresent. Looks like they're almost there in France, for example, but not here.
"Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high" - how low do they need to be for goodness sake? Currently we are at fewer than 30 per day in whole of NHS England! Well under 1000 new infections per day in a population of 67 million.
I take your point, but it's perception that counts, not reality. People perceive the virus to be still fairly rampant. Government and its agencies are to blame for this - too many different data sources, too slow to collect and record data, and ineffective track and trace. If the numbers are really that low, effective government communications should be able to tell us exactly where is safe and where isn't. I know the data is there, and some of it appears on here - but the great British public is unaware of what's going on in their towns/cities, I'm sure.
Agreed. Public perception of the stats is awful. Woefully ignorant and mathmatically inept. I`ve criticised the government before for not effectively communicating the steady reductions in cases and deaths. I don`t understand why they have been so poor at this.
Totally agree.
Your chances of catching the Rona now are really very low, unless you're in a hotspot like Leicester, and even there it's hardly rampant
The government should now be stressing this every day. Yes be alert, but don't be cowed. We need to get the economy shifting, ASAFP
True for most of the country: new cases have now fallen to such low levels that, realistically, it's not going to get any safer to go out until there's an effective vaccine or cure. So, you either sit at home for years waiting for that to happen whilst the world collapses around you, or you go out and take your chances.
But, of course, as some of the previous posters correctly identified, the public is very lacking in its understanding of risk. For example, how many people under current circumstances wouldn't hold the rail going down a flight of stairs in a public building, for fear of getting other people's germs on their hands? And yet falls are also an important cause of death and serious injury. People are trying to protect themselves from a virus that is no longer in mass circulation in most places (and doesn't cause serious illness in most of the people it infects) by undertaking a more risky activity.
It's wise to be alert to the remaining threat still posed by this virus, but you can't let it take over your life.
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Ironic given that most of the parking charges in hospital car parks came in as part of the PFI contracts signed under new labour who get away with it to this day.
One of their poor policies and something they should have abolished before they left office. I am happy to admit they got it wrong.
All credit to you for,that. I just find it ironic the deluge of crap on twitter from labour supporters, especially new labour sorts, savaging the govt over this when this was Labour’s fault in the first place and the govt have gone some way to,right this wrong. But then the govts media management is atrocious.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to attack the Government of today for not abolishing it, as long as you concede that past Governments - including Labour - also did not. To me that doesn't seem contradictory.
I think people take a far too black and white view of New Labour. I think it did good and bad things. Some very good things, some very bad things.
I think this current Government has done good things, I think the actual lockdown itself was good but I think since it has gone downhill and we were too slow to implement it. I congratulate the Chancellor on stealing many Labour policies, or at least the spirit of them. Investing is the right thing to do. I just fear it won't last.
I don't feel conflicted by saying any of that. I am a leftie, Labour man but I am very strongly of the view that Tory <> evil like the morons on Twitter would say. I'd even marry one, doesn't much matter to me what political persuasion you're of.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
See my edit. I suggested Cooper
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
They won't call it EEA. We will have a bespoke agreement like the Swiss. We are keeping free movement though. Too many Brexiteers have woken up to the double trouble of can't retire to Spain and can't find people to do work in jobs we don't want. It won't be called free movement.
We aren't keeping free movement, the one guarantee is that even if this Tory government agrees a deal with the EU involving regulatory alignment it will not involve free movement as that guarantees loss of the Red Wall, whose voters voted Leave and Tory in 2019 to end uncontrolled immigration from the EU and reduction in their wages and pressure on housing and public services.
If we keep free movement they will either go back to Labour given the loss of the only reason they voted Tory last time or go to the Brexit Party
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
See my edit. I suggested Cooper
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
Something really BAD may be happening in central London. Businesswise
Close friend just went to Charing Cross Rd. Half the bookshops are still shut, also the restaurants, bars, etc.
Why? Presumably there isn't yet enough passing traffic and footfall to make it profitable to open. But when will it ever be? So many people are going to WFH for months to come, which means these places will stay shut, which means even fewer people - eg tourists - will come in to town, as there are even fewer reasons to make the journey, which means even more places shut down for ever.
We could be witnessing the start of a hideous chain reaction of default and bankruptcy, hollowing out a global city in a few months.
I pray I am wrong.
We lived in Central London for 30 years and loved it, now retired back to Cheshire. I think what you are seeing may be worse but not too different about what is happening everywhere in the UK on a smaller scale. Lots of local places are shutting for good.
Part of the problem seems to me to be that a substantial minority of the public don't really give a shit about the virus spreading or the safety of others so it keeps others away.
To give you an example we went into town on public transport today for the first time. We assumed that as it is compulsory to wear a mask we would be happy to do so only to find people on the bus without masks. I mentioned it to the driver who told me "we're not the police mate". So what is the point of making it compulsory if nobody enforces it? We won't be going into town to a restaurant again for a good while.
What I find ironical is the very people who aren't giving a shit now will be the very ones whinging most loudly when the pubs close down again, the shops shut and businesses collapse.
A big London bus went past my study window about 20 minutes ago. It had six people on it (at rush hour). Two were wearing masks. The driver wasn't one of the mask wearers.
It's pathetic. Even the staff aren't bothering
An economic whirlwind approaches, and we can't take basic precautions
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Did you miss PMQs?
I missed it. What happened? Your verdict?
Starmer fluffed it, Johnson had an answer to everything.
Q1 Starmer "you're blaming care home workers" A1 Johnson "I take full responsibility, I praise care workers" Q2-Q5 Starmer "you're blaming care workers" A2-A5 Johnson "I've already said I'm praising care workers, you're proceeding with your prescripted questions" Q6 Starmer "Why are you abolishing free parking for NHS staff" A6 Johnson "We are offering free parking for NHS and as per our manifesto commitment are looking to expand that to patients too"
Starmer did do a bit of a Jeff Astle at the 1970 World Cup, but as we Baggies know everyone has an off day and King Jeff will always be a legend.
Besides which, the takeaway from PMQs will be Johnson refusing to apologise to care home workers, so no harm done.
Johnson's "win" came about because he was less bad than Starmer this week.
Johnson simply isn't a good Commons performer, because he's a terrible orator and can't speak in an intelligent and articulate manner.
Johnson hasn't yet won with an actual killer blow, I can't think of a single put down or strong moment of his.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
You wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison? Have you ever read Private Eye? That sort of comparison is one of the oldest jokes out there.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
Reeves would have been the obvious appointment.
It's possible she's being lined up.
I don't believe this cabinet is permanent, I believe Starmer is slowly but surely kicking the leftists out of positions of authority. Right now he's establishing himself, then the party comes next. EHRC will give him lots of cover.
Good too, stop the Corbynites, of which I was one. Stop me!
Good to see these polls but why do American polls put the lead in brackets rather than any swing - just mildly annoying. We can do the math(s) easily enough.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
In terms of free movement, if the UK agreed to shadow regulations on goods and services, follow the rules to the letter, no actual say at all, and contributing to the cost of the system, that might be enough to prevent the need for checks at the UK/EEA border. Because the impracticality of controlling the border on the UK side seems to be the killer point, and that's no closer to actually being solved now than in 2016.
To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.
But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
They won't call it EEA. We will have a bespoke agreement like the Swiss. We are keeping free movement though. Too many Brexiteers have woken up to the double trouble of can't retire to Spain and can't find people to do work in jobs we don't want. It won't be called free movement.
Sort of thought the same thing for a while.
Honestly Johnson's biggest achievement has been to completely lie and sell the same deal to his party - and the country - with great success.
If we end up in EEA, or Johnson Economic Area (JEA), then I will shake his hand and congratulate him (when it is safe to do so).
To this day I believe his heart isn't really in Brexit
We want to emphasise that there are lots of people who continue to have symptoms long after they are no longer infectious - this is an area of huge importance, and one that our researchers are very keen to understand better
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
You wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison? Have you ever read Private Eye? That sort of comparison is one of the oldest jokes out there.
I remember them doing Ian Brady and Myra Hindley compared to John Major and Norman Lamont in 1992.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
See my edit. I suggested Cooper
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
I think the attack is slightly different.
What do you think of my other question?
I think you have a strain of chivalry in you, and you see a lady being slighted, and feel protective. That's nice.
I also think it is naive. Politicians want to lord it over us, they have to take a lot of stick in return. Them's the rules. Democracy. And it is fair that it is done to all, left or right, men and women.
Also, you really DO want your Chancellor of the Exchequer to sound and look confident and forthright. It is such an important job.
Sunak is good at this aspect (so far). Gordon Brown was good, in a different way: He was the image of a deeply reliable, slightly boring, well educated Edinburgh bank manager, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of your finances (even if the reality was very different).
Starmer shoulda picked Cooper. I presume there was some political reason he couldn't. She's too Blairy or something
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
See my edit. I suggested Cooper
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
I think the attack is slightly different.
What do you think of my other question?
I think you have a strain of chivalry in you, and you see a lady being slighted, and feel protective. That's nice.
I also think it is naive. Politicians want to lord it over us, they have to take a lot of stick in return. Them's the rules. Democracy. And it is fair that it is done to all, left or right, men and women.
Also, you really DO want your Chancellor of the Exchequer to sound and look confident and forthright. It is such an important job.
Sunak is good at this aspect (so far). Gordon Brown was good, in a different way: He was the image of a deeply reliable, slightly boring, well educated Edinburgh bank manager, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of your finances (even if the reality was very different).
Starmer shoulda picked Cooper. I presume there was some political reason he couldn't. She's too Blairy or something
He wanted an attack dog on the Parliamentary Select Committee was my understanding.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
In terms of free movement, if the UK agreed to shadow regulations on goods and services, follow the rules to the letter, no actual say at all, and contributing to the cost of the system, that might be enough to prevent the need for checks at the UK/EEA border. Because the impracticality of controlling the border on the UK side seems to be the killer point, and that's no closer to actually being solved now than in 2016.
To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.
But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
We will never rejoin given it almost certainly would mean the euro and Schengen now we have left and lost our opt outs
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
In terms of free movement, if the UK agreed to shadow regulations on goods and services, follow the rules to the letter, no actual say at all, and contributing to the cost of the system, that might be enough to prevent the need for checks at the UK/EEA border. Because the impracticality of controlling the border on the UK side seems to be the killer point, and that's no closer to actually being solved now than in 2016.
To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.
But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
I would not support what you call EEA minus, I would vigorously oppose it. But I expect a great many Brexit supporters, especially for instance @isam would find EEA minus free movement to be a fantastic deal.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
They won't call it EEA. We will have a bespoke agreement like the Swiss. We are keeping free movement though. Too many Brexiteers have woken up to the double trouble of can't retire to Spain and can't find people to do work in jobs we don't want. It won't be called free movement.
Sort of thought the same thing for a while.
Honestly Johnson's biggest achievement has been to completely lie and sell the same deal to his party - and the country - with great success.
If we end up in EEA, or Johnson Economic Area (JEA), then I will shake his hand and congratulate him (when it is safe to do so).
To this day I believe his heart isn't really in Brexit
On topic, the latest Kantar poll puts Trzaskowski a 1.2% lead over Duda (50.6 to 49.4). That's basically a dead heat.
From America, the latest Economist/YouGov poll shows no change from the previous with Biden leading Trump 49-40. The crosstabs are once again huge.
Among men, Trump leads 46-44 but among women Biden is ahead 53-36. Trump leads White voters 50-40 but Biden is well clear with black votes and with Hispanic voters leads 72-19 which is bigger than I've seen in other polls which have shown Trump support among Hispanics up to near 30% so a slight question.
The regional split has Biden up 51-39 in the NE and 54-35 in the West. In the South, Biden leads 47-46 and in the Midwest Biden leads 45-39 which is again slightly out of kilter with some other polls.
The other curiousity is Independents breaking 40-39 for Trump.
I can't see the actual sampling numbers broken down in the cross tabs - could they have over-sampled Democrats and Independents?
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
I still believe we ultimately end up in EEA
Very unlikely unless its a very reformed EEA.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
In terms of free movement, if the UK agreed to shadow regulations on goods and services, follow the rules to the letter, no actual say at all, and contributing to the cost of the system, that might be enough to prevent the need for checks at the UK/EEA border. Because the impracticality of controlling the border on the UK side seems to be the killer point, and that's no closer to actually being solved now than in 2016.
To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.
But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
I would not support what you call EEA minus, I would vigorously oppose it. But I expect a great many Brexit supporters, especially for instance @isam would find EEA minus free movement to be a fantastic deal.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
To appease the left
Exactly - and that is why she won't last IMHO.
She's being set up as a fall person, I am almost sure of it.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
To appease the left
Exactly - and that is why she won't last IMHO.
She's being set up as a fall person, I am almost sure of it.
No it isn't - but then I am sure the Government must know that so why take any credibility hit?
Well it was already unpopular, so returning to the status quo would have limited additional impact perhaps. At the least, it was already an unpopular situation they felt must or could be bourne, so may continue to assume that notwithstanding Covid.
Yes but them taking it away is going to generate headlines and cause them some damage, even if tiny. It seems like a pretty cheap thing to keep - just like the school meals - and is something I just find it odd as a hill to die on.
It honestly confirms to me, that this Government is lacking a human touch. And that works against an enemy in the EU, not so sure it works with well respected nurses and doctors.
Did you miss PMQs?
I missed it. What happened? Your verdict?
Starmer fluffed it, Johnson had an answer to everything.
Q1 Starmer "you're blaming care home workers" A1 Johnson "I take full responsibility, I praise care workers" Q2-Q5 Starmer "you're blaming care workers" A2-A5 Johnson "I've already said I'm praising care workers, you're proceeding with your prescripted questions" Q6 Starmer "Why are you abolishing free parking for NHS staff" A6 Johnson "We are offering free parking for NHS and as per our manifesto commitment are looking to expand that to patients too"
Starmer did do a bit of a Jeff Astle at the 1970 World Cup, but as we Baggies know everyone has an off day and King Jeff will always be a legend.
Besides which, the takeaway from PMQs will be Johnson refusing to apologise to care home workers, so no harm done.
Johnson's "win" came about because he was less bad than Starmer this week.
Johnson simply isn't a good Commons performer, because he's a terrible orator and can't speak in an intelligent and articulate manner.
Johnson hasn't yet won with an actual killer blow, I can't think of a single put down or strong moment of his.
Like I said no harm done.
I was watching Professor Alice Roberts (eye candy for the older man) explaining the role of the town of Dover during WW2 on TV last night.
There was much footage of Churchill. The man's oratory was very impressive. Whatever superlatives you read on here about Johnson, he is no Churchill, not even a Poundland Churchill.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
See my edit. I suggested Cooper
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
I think the attack is slightly different.
What do you think of my other question?
I think you have a strain of chivalry in you, and you see a lady being slighted, and feel protective. That's nice.
I also think it is naive. Politicians want to lord it over us, they have to take a lot of stick in return. Them's the rules. Democracy. And it is fair that it is done to all, left or right, men and women.
Also, you really DO want your Chancellor of the Exchequer to sound and look confident and forthright. It is such an important job.
Sunak is good at this aspect (so far). Gordon Brown was good, in a different way: He was the image of a deeply reliable, slightly boring, well educated Edinburgh bank manager, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of your finances (even if the reality was very different).
Starmer shoulda picked Cooper. I presume there was some political reason he couldn't. She's too Blairy or something
Sunak is an interesting example. Physically he is very small compared to most politicians and typically in the past that has been considered a weakness but he is very confident within his own skin.
I don't know if anyone else feels the same but to my eyes Dodds always looks like she's going to start crying. Its unfortunate and not something to judge someone for though.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
To appease the left
Exactly - and that is why she won't last IMHO.
She's being set up as a fall person, I am almost sure of it.
Starmer is a schemer.
Yes he is.
But that will be either his great strength or biggest weakness IMHO.
The big work has not so far been what he's done publicly, it's that quietly he's pretty much got full control over the party and nobody seems to have noticed.
The left is currently eating itself alive and attacking each other and the right thinks they've got another Blairite.
He's probably in the most stable and influential position of any leader since Blair. It's his party now.
On topic, the latest Kantar poll puts Trzaskowski a 1.2% lead over Duda (50.6 to 49.4). That's basically a dead heat.
From America, the latest Economist/YouGov poll shows no change from the previous with Biden leading Trump 49-40. The crosstabs are once again huge.
Among men, Trump leads 46-44 but among women Biden is ahead 53-36. Trump leads White voters 50-40 but Biden is well clear with black votes and with Hispanic voters leads 72-19 which is bigger than I've seen in other polls which have shown Trump support among Hispanics up to near 30% so a slight question.
The regional split has Biden up 51-39 in the NE and 54-35 in the West. In the South, Biden leads 47-46 and in the Midwest Biden leads 45-39 which is again slightly out of kilter with some other polls.
The other curiousity is Independents breaking 40-39 for Trump.
I can't see the actual sampling numbers broken down in the cross tabs - could they have over-sampled Democrats and Independents?
The South and Midwest still much closer than nationally and Florida and the Midwest is where the election will be won
Something really BAD may be happening in central London. Businesswise
Close friend just went to Charing Cross Rd. Half the bookshops are still shut, also the restaurants, bars, etc.
Why? Presumably there isn't yet enough passing traffic and footfall to make it profitable to open. But when will it ever be? So many people are going to WFH for months to come, which means these places will stay shut, which means even fewer people - eg tourists - will come in to town, as there are even fewer reasons to make the journey, which means even more places shut down for ever.
We could be witnessing the start of a hideous chain reaction of default and bankruptcy, hollowing out a global city in a few months.
I pray I am wrong.
Inevitable - very few people live in Central, Central London anymore. All the shops, restaurants etc are priced and setup for millions of people who come into the very centre each day.
Now they are not - perhaps 90% down.
It feels almost inevitable. Soho might be alright as its still THE nightlife destination.
But somewhere like Covent Garden, which is mainly retail and restaurants and tourist traps? - fecked. It is very sad.
And this pain will start in central London, but then it will ripple out....
Why would it ripple out?
A bit less of an obsession about London could be good for the rest of us.
Are you just a bit dim?
Central London in all its glory - restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs, cafes, theatres, galleries - generates enormous amounts of money, and of course employment. But nearly all of this biz comes from workers who commute in, and tourists, it is not self sustaining.
Now take away most of the commuters and most of the tourists and most of those businesses will go under very quickly.
That means tens of thousands of unemployed people, who live all over London: and now they can no longer afford to spend money in THEIR neighborhoods. The ripple has begun, and it is spreading beyond the centre.
The closure of all these businesses also means a collapse in the tax take - for councils, and for the Inland Revenue. That means rates have to go up elsewhere in London, to compensate.
Thus. More businesses go under, London becomes less attractive, rich people move out entirely, taxes have to go up even more as these taxpayers depart. And so on.
An advanced economy like the UK is highly interconnected. It is a complex machine. Collapsing central London is like taking a hammer to the engine of that machine. It might still work, but it will go slower, and make weird noises, and maybe catch fire.
Read what happened to New York City's economy in the 1960s and 70s. We could be about to see that replayed, but speeded up, in London (and New York, for that matter)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Has The Second Coming become the If du jour? It's popped up a helluva lot lately.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
Something really BAD may be happening in central London. Businesswise
Close friend just went to Charing Cross Rd. Half the bookshops are still shut, also the restaurants, bars, etc.
Why? Presumably there isn't yet enough passing traffic and footfall to make it profitable to open. But when will it ever be? So many people are going to WFH for months to come, which means these places will stay shut, which means even fewer people - eg tourists - will come in to town, as there are even fewer reasons to make the journey, which means even more places shut down for ever.
We could be witnessing the start of a hideous chain reaction of default and bankruptcy, hollowing out a global city in a few months.
I pray I am wrong.
Inevitable - very few people live in Central, Central London anymore. All the shops, restaurants etc are priced and setup for millions of people who come into the very centre each day.
Now they are not - perhaps 90% down.
It feels almost inevitable. Soho might be alright as its still THE nightlife destination.
But somewhere like Covent Garden, which is mainly retail and restaurants and tourist traps? - fecked. It is very sad.
And this pain will start in central London, but then it will ripple out....
Why would it ripple out?
A bit less of an obsession about London could be good for the rest of us.
Are you just a bit dim?
Central London in all its glory - restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs, cafes, theatres, galleries - generates enormous amounts of money, and of course employment. But nearly all of this biz comes from workers who commute in, and tourists, it is not self sustaining.
Now take away most of the commuters and most of the tourists and most of those businesses will go under very quickly.
That means tens of thousands of unemployed people, who live all over London: and now they can no longer afford to spend money in THEIR neighborhoods. The ripple has begun, and it is spreading beyond the centre.
The closure of all these businesses also means a collapse in the tax take - for councils, and for the Inland Revenue. That means rates have to go up elsewhere in London, to compensate.
Thus. More businesses go under, London becomes less attractive, rich people move out entirely, taxes have to go up even more as these taxpayers depart. And so on.
An advanced economy like the UK is highly interconnected. It is a complex machine. Collapsing central London is like taking a hammer to the engine of that machine. It might still work, but it will go slower, and make weird noises, and maybe catch fire.
Read what happened to New York City's economy in the 1960s and 70s. We could be about to see that replayed, but speeded up, in London (and New York, for that matter)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Has The Second Coming become the If du jour? It's popped up a helluva lot lately.
It was written by Yeats in the aftermath of Spanish Flu, which nearly took his wife.
Quite a few lit crits believe these specific lines - "the blood dimmed tide" - are a reference to the disease
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
The economy won't revive until people feel confident enough to go out to shop, eat and drink. Currently, people are reasonable confident they won't catch the virus outside - hence packed beaches, parks and scenes of street drinking. But many people are fearful of doing inside activities - shops, restaurants, inside pubs - because they are not confident that they won't catch the virus there. The exception may be the young (e.g. under 40s), but there's not enough of them, and they don't have enough money, to revive the economy or on their own.
So to return to normal economic activity, people need to be confident that the disease is under control. They are not yet. Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high, and people know that the track, trace isolate system is not working fully yet.
When Anneliese Dodds was criticised for talking about the virus in response to Sunak, this is what she was getting at. Confidence that the virus is under control is a prerequisite to a return to normal activity, and this government can't yet give us that confidence because they have not been very good at managing the pandemic.
So despite Sunak's exhortations and bribes, we'll only revive the economy when people are reasonably confident that the virus is not omnipresent. Looks like they're almost there in France, for example, but not here.
"Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high" - how low do they need to be for goodness sake? Currently we are at fewer than 30 per day in whole of NHS England! Well under 1000 new infections per day in a population of 67 million.
I take your point, but it's perception that counts, not reality. People perceive the virus to be still fairly rampant. Government and its agencies are to blame for this - too many different data sources, too slow to collect and record data, and ineffective track and trace. If the numbers are really that low, effective government communications should be able to tell us exactly where is safe and where isn't. I know the data is there, and some of it appears on here - but the great British public is unaware of what's going on in their towns/cities, I'm sure.
Agreed. Public perception of the stats is awful. Woefully ignorant and mathmatically inept. I`ve criticised the government before for not effectively communicating the steady reductions in cases and deaths. I don`t understand why they have been so poor at this.
Totally agree.
Your chances of catching the Rona now are really very low, unless you're in a hotspot like Leicester, and even there it's hardly rampant
The government should now be stressing this every day. Yes be alert, but don't be cowed. We need to get the economy shifting, ASAFP
I suspect people are more willing to believe bad news and scare stories than the other way around.
They're also unwilling to do any research, especially if it involves numbers, to inform themselves.
And so the '36 areas to get second lockdown within days' bollox we had last week is widely believed.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
This is such an awful story. How many more like this?
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
The economy won't revive until people feel confident enough to go out to shop, eat and drink. Currently, people are reasonable confident they won't catch the virus outside - hence packed beaches, parks and scenes of street drinking. But many people are fearful of doing inside activities - shops, restaurants, inside pubs - because they are not confident that they won't catch the virus there. The exception may be the young (e.g. under 40s), but there's not enough of them, and they don't have enough money, to revive the economy or on their own.
So to return to normal economic activity, people need to be confident that the disease is under control. They are not yet. Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high, and people know that the track, trace isolate system is not working fully yet.
When Anneliese Dodds was criticised for talking about the virus in response to Sunak, this is what she was getting at. Confidence that the virus is under control is a prerequisite to a return to normal activity, and this government can't yet give us that confidence because they have not been very good at managing the pandemic.
So despite Sunak's exhortations and bribes, we'll only revive the economy when people are reasonably confident that the virus is not omnipresent. Looks like they're almost there in France, for example, but not here.
"Our figures for deaths and infections are still too high" - how low do they need to be for goodness sake? Currently we are at fewer than 30 per day in whole of NHS England! Well under 1000 new infections per day in a population of 67 million.
I take your point, but it's perception that counts, not reality. People perceive the virus to be still fairly rampant. Government and its agencies are to blame for this - too many different data sources, too slow to collect and record data, and ineffective track and trace. If the numbers are really that low, effective government communications should be able to tell us exactly where is safe and where isn't. I know the data is there, and some of it appears on here - but the great British public is unaware of what's going on in their towns/cities, I'm sure.
Agreed. Public perception of the stats is awful. Woefully ignorant and mathmatically inept. I`ve criticised the government before for not effectively communicating the steady reductions in cases and deaths. I don`t understand why they have been so poor at this.
Totally agree.
Your chances of catching the Rona now are really very low, unless you're in a hotspot like Leicester, and even there it's hardly rampant
The government should now be stressing this every day. Yes be alert, but don't be cowed. We need to get the economy shifting, ASAFP
I suspect people are more willing to believe bad news and scare stories than the other way around.
Somehow I really don't think he needs telling that!
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
I remember laughing at the Tory canvassers in Cowbridge 'saving the pound'.
Like I said " I would prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent"!
Something really BAD may be happening in central London. Businesswise
Close friend just went to Charing Cross Rd. Half the bookshops are still shut, also the restaurants, bars, etc.
Why? Presumably there isn't yet enough passing traffic and footfall to make it profitable to open. But when will it ever be? So many people are going to WFH for months to come, which means these places will stay shut, which means even fewer people - eg tourists - will come in to town, as there are even fewer reasons to make the journey, which means even more places shut down for ever.
We could be witnessing the start of a hideous chain reaction of default and bankruptcy, hollowing out a global city in a few months.
I pray I am wrong.
Inevitable - very few people live in Central, Central London anymore. All the shops, restaurants etc are priced and setup for millions of people who come into the very centre each day.
Now they are not - perhaps 90% down.
It feels almost inevitable. Soho might be alright as its still THE nightlife destination.
But somewhere like Covent Garden, which is mainly retail and restaurants and tourist traps? - fecked. It is very sad.
And this pain will start in central London, but then it will ripple out....
Why would it ripple out?
A bit less of an obsession about London could be good for the rest of us.
Are you just a bit dim?
Central London in all its glory - restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs, cafes, theatres, galleries - generates enormous amounts of money, and of course employment. But nearly all of this biz comes from workers who commute in, and tourists, it is not self sustaining.
Now take away most of the commuters and most of the tourists and most of those businesses will go under very quickly.
That means tens of thousands of unemployed people, who live all over London: and now they can no longer afford to spend money in THEIR neighborhoods. The ripple has begun, and it is spreading beyond the centre.
The closure of all these businesses also means a collapse in the tax take - for councils, and for the Inland Revenue. That means rates have to go up elsewhere in London, to compensate.
Thus. More businesses go under, London becomes less attractive, rich people move out entirely, taxes have to go up even more as these taxpayers depart. And so on.
An advanced economy like the UK is highly interconnected. It is a complex machine. Collapsing central London is like taking a hammer to the engine of that machine. It might still work, but it will go slower, and make weird noises, and maybe catch fire.
Read what happened to New York City's economy in the 1960s and 70s. We could be about to see that replayed, but speeded up, in London (and New York, for that matter)
So it's gonnae be one of those nights. Nice to see you embracing your inner Scotchman.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
It’s not Hague’s fault he was up against Blair in his prime.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Interesting point of view from the left-of-centre David Aaronovitch.
"Sorry Keir, unconscious bias training is bunk We all need to confront our prejudices but this corporate bandwagon is an easy and meaningless get-out-of-jail card David Aaronovitch" (£)
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
It’s not Hague’s fault he was up against Blair in his prime.
Michael Howard would have done better against Blair as he proved in 2005 as would Ken Clarke, either would have been a better choice for the Tories after the 1997 defeat than Hague
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Not sure, there was visceral hatred of the Tories in parts of the South in the last election. Obviously didn't amount to much but likely has a lot do with Corbyn vs Johnson.
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
It’s not Hague’s fault he was up against Blair in his prime.
Michael Howard would have done better against Blair as he proved in 2005 as would Ken Clarke, either would have been a better choice for the Tories after the 1997 defeat than Hague
You have no idea how it would have turned out. You can’t compare the situation in 2005 to the situation in 2001.
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Outside of politics one of my favourite examples is comparing Roy Hodgson to an owl ...
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
I remember laughing at the Tory canvassers in Cowbridge 'saving the pound'.
Like I said " I would prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent"!
Well to be fair to Hague, though he did suffer a landslide defeat he did indeed 'save the pound'
This is such an awful story. How many more like this?
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
Good friend of mine had symptoms that concerned him, just as Covid was hitting Seattle area hard. Had to wait about a month until situation settled down out her before getting checked out. Diagnosed with cancer, detected early enough that prognosis is good. Has been undergoing sporadic chemo, not fun but bearable. PROVIDED of course he doesn't get Covid also.
Needless to say, he's staying close to home. Which BTW is just blocks from CHOP.
This is such an awful story. How many more like this?
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
This has been a subject of repeated alarm calls throughout the Plague - and a wave of mortality caused by the near-collapse of non-Covid NHS services would appear, logically, to be inevitable. The only dispute concerns the scale of the damage caused.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Not sure, there was visceral hatred of the Tories in parts of the South in the last election. Obviously didn't amount to much but likely has a lot do with Corbyn vs Johnson.
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
The Tories still won the South outside of London though.
If we have a trade deal with the EU they are less likely to go to Starmer or the LDs than on WTO Terms
The world has changed perhaps irrevocably and yet Sunak and some on here think with enough "free money" we can go back to January 1st and start living as though the last 6 months haven't happened.
The world has changed - there has been a revolution but it's nothing to do with statues or being "woke", it's far more fundamental than that. It's the end of the commute, the end of the back office, the end of half a century or more of working practices.
It's as fundamental a change as was the end of manufacturing industries or the passing of coal mining but this one affects the prosperous south not the north.
Home working is here and it is here to stay. It works for most people most of the time very well and people have discovered they'd rather enjoy a leisurely breakfast than run off to the bus stop or station in the wind and rain to stand on a crowded bus or train with the other drones.
The world has changed.
I'd have liked to see Sunak acknowledge and champion that revolution but he's incapable of that kind of vision. Like Johnson, he wants to be liked and of course pushing a wheelbarrow full of free money down the street will win you plenty of friends but he needs to be more than that if he is ever going to be taken seriously as a future Prime Minister.
Capitalism is brutal, it encourages adaptation, resourceful thinking and new ways of doing things. It punishes inertia and praises innovation. If jobs and businesses go, new ones will be created. If there are no jobs where you are, as has been done since the Industrial Revolution, you go from where you are to where the jobs and the money are.
Half filling up restaurants on a Monday to Wednesday through August may make some feel better but it delays the inevitable and prolongs the agony just as extending and tweaking furlough does. I'd rather see the largesse spent on job creation than job preservation, recognising we live in a new world and there are opportunities aplenty for those willing to take the risk.
Yes, that's the "risk" - it's not about being told you're frightened or language like "cowering", it's about offering help to those with entrepreneurial vision to take advantage of new technology and new ideas.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Not sure, there was visceral hatred of the Tories in parts of the South in the last election. Obviously didn't amount to much but likely has a lot do with Corbyn vs Johnson.
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
It all depends who is leading the Tories by 2024.
Sunak, despite being a Leaver, brings home the Southern Tories, the flip side to that is he loses the blue wall (primarily because he is not Johnson). Johnson on the other hand keeps the blue wall and loses the South.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
Do I not like that denouement!
Would much prefer to think you're falling overly for the "Dom" hype.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Not sure, there was visceral hatred of the Tories in parts of the South in the last election. Obviously didn't amount to much but likely has a lot do with Corbyn vs Johnson.
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
The Tories still won the South outside of London though.
If we have a trade deal with the EU they are less likely to go to Starmer or the LDs than on WTO Terms
It’s not just “a deal” it will depend on what the deal actually is, and what the long-term unforeseen circumstances of said deal are.
The government is ending free movement and it will not be called free movement. Europeans will not have the right to live and work in this country freely. However we will make the sovereign decision to set our own rules and those will allow people to freely move here because we have jobs we don't want to do. And in return we will be permitted to retire to Spain.
Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
I wonder if a man would get that sort of comparison, I highly doubt it.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
In a PB thread header I once said David Davis was as useful as a marzipan dildo.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
Praise indeed for David Davis.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
I remember laughing at the Tory canvassers in Cowbridge 'saving the pound'.
Like I said " I would prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent"!
Well to be fair to Hague, though he did suffer a landslide defeat he did indeed 'save the pound'
This is such an awful story. How many more like this?
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
This has been a subject of repeated alarm calls throughout the Plague - and a wave of mortality caused by the near-collapse of non-Covid NHS services would appear, logically, to be inevitable. The only dispute concerns the scale of the damage caused.
Something really BAD may be happening in central London. Businesswise
Close friend just went to Charing Cross Rd. Half the bookshops are still shut, also the restaurants, bars, etc.
Why? Presumably there isn't yet enough passing traffic and footfall to make it profitable to open. But when will it ever be? So many people are going to WFH for months to come, which means these places will stay shut, which means even fewer people - eg tourists - will come in to town, as there are even fewer reasons to make the journey, which means even more places shut down for ever.
We could be witnessing the start of a hideous chain reaction of default and bankruptcy, hollowing out a global city in a few months.
I pray I am wrong.
Inevitable - very few people live in Central, Central London anymore. All the shops, restaurants etc are priced and setup for millions of people who come into the very centre each day.
Now they are not - perhaps 90% down.
It feels almost inevitable. Soho might be alright as its still THE nightlife destination.
But somewhere like Covent Garden, which is mainly retail and restaurants and tourist traps? - fecked. It is very sad.
And this pain will start in central London, but then it will ripple out....
Why would it ripple out?
A bit less of an obsession about London could be good for the rest of us.
Are you just a bit dim?
Central London in all its glory - restaurants, bars, pubs, clubs, cafes, theatres, galleries - generates enormous amounts of money, and of course employment. But nearly all of this biz comes from workers who commute in, and tourists, it is not self sustaining.
Now take away most of the commuters and most of the tourists and most of those businesses will go under very quickly.
That means tens of thousands of unemployed people, who live all over London: and now they can no longer afford to spend money in THEIR neighborhoods. The ripple has begun, and it is spreading beyond the centre.
The closure of all these businesses also means a collapse in the tax take - for councils, and for the Inland Revenue. That means rates have to go up elsewhere in London, to compensate.
Thus. More businesses go under, London becomes less attractive, rich people move out entirely, taxes have to go up even more as these taxpayers depart. And so on.
An advanced economy like the UK is highly interconnected. It is a complex machine. Collapsing central London is like taking a hammer to the engine of that machine. It might still work, but it will go slower, and make weird noises, and maybe catch fire.
Read what happened to New York City's economy in the 1960s and 70s. We could be about to see that replayed, but speeded up, in London (and New York, for that matter)
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned
Has The Second Coming become the If du jour? It's popped up a helluva lot lately.
It just seemed right for the post it commented on.
I wouldn't, the 2001 election was still the worst election I have canvassed in as a Tory and the worst election night count I have attended.
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
Yes, it was in many ways worse for the Conservatives than 1997.
Blair, rather like Johnson, may end up having his administration defined by an event far beyond his control. Blair's second term was irrevocably changed by 9/11 - had that not happened, I think he would have enjoyed a third landslide over the Conservatives and retired on his won terms.
Johnson may end up being defined by Covid-19 which wasn't his fault in any sense. How he has and continues to respond to the ramifications of the virus will be as significant as how Blair responded to the 9/11 attacks.
Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.
I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...
Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.
I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...
Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.
Forgive him. Southerners don't know any better.
When in my youth, I used to stand on the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, ignorant visitors from southern clubs such as West Ham, Charlton etc would regularly and predictably break into a chorus of ‘we hate geordies etc’, only to be drowned out by the home support joining in.
To be followed by a somewhat pedantic chorus of ‘Tee, Tee, Teessider’.
Shouldn't the Smoggies be singing "Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!"?
Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.
I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...
Nothing wrong with Hartlepool. I had an excellent day out there a couple of years back.
I haven't personally had the pleasure of sampling the local guacamole, but I'm sure it's a delightful place. However, it doesn't quite have the density of interest required to make it a bucket-list tourist destination.
Hartlepool's like the shittest part of Essex but with Geordie accents.
Geordie accents? GEORDIE? Mate, you've not been to Pools and listened hard enough...
Best thing about Hartlepools? A lot of roads out.
Forgive him. Southerners don't know any better.
When in my youth, I used to stand on the Holgate End at Ayresome Park, ignorant visitors from southern clubs such as West Ham, Charlton etc would regularly and predictably break into a chorus of ‘we hate geordies etc’, only to be drowned out by the home support joining in.
To be followed by a somewhat pedantic chorus of ‘Tee, Tee, Teessider’.
Shouldn't the Smoggies be singing "Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!"?
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Not sure, there was visceral hatred of the Tories in parts of the South in the last election. Obviously didn't amount to much but likely has a lot do with Corbyn vs Johnson.
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
Labour won 8 seats out of 84 in the south-east, and 6 seats out of 55 in the south-west.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Broadly agree, and I suspect that if we got to (say) November with No Trade Deal in sight, BoJo would find himself no longer Prime Minister. If push came to shove, and without Corbyn, I can just about imagine 40 defectors at the crunch moment.
It's worth remembering that No Trade Deal will do at least some damage to manufacturing industry, which will stuff the Red Wall seats even more than the Southern Shires. In fact, I'm not sure that a trade deal (as opposed to a single market) will be enough; the sheer faff of the extra paperwork will tip some factories over the edge.
So No Deal is a bluff, and not a very good one. The government should have done like 1944, building Operation Fortitude-style fake customs posts staffed by dummy customs officers. We need seamless movement of goods and services, want control of movement of people... what are we prepared to give to get these?
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.
The government is ending free movement and it will not be called free movement. Europeans will not have the right to live and work in this country freely. However we will make the sovereign decision to set our own rules and those will allow people to freely move here because we have jobs we don't want to do. And in return we will be permitted to retire to Spain.
Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!
The key, however, will be no entitlement to benefits.
The British sense of fairness has always been pretty strong - they saw the system being gamed by some EU movers. It didn't go down well.
What @HYUFD and others fail to realise that once (if) a deal is made, the Brexit issue is then over for voters. They will then care about whether they feel that things are improving, and that’s entirely subjective. For example despite objectively unemployment being almost nothing, people still blamed EU free-movement for their employment woes.
The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.
The government is ending free movement and it will not be called free movement. Europeans will not have the right to live and work in this country freely. However we will make the sovereign decision to set our own rules and those will allow people to freely move here because we have jobs we don't want to do. And in return we will be permitted to retire to Spain.
Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!
The key, however, will be no entitlement to benefits.
The British sense of fairness has always been pretty strong - they saw the system being gamed by some EU movers. It didn't go down well.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
Do I not like that denouement!
Would much prefer to think you're falling overly for the "Dom" hype.
And I do - I think - think that.
It comes of being a physics weirdo. (The 2021 bit seems like a best realistic case, and not crazy given that Johnson blinked on both the Benn Bill and the Withdrawal Agreement. The 2024 bit is more fanciful, but what would you try if you thought you were a political 4D chess player?)
This is such an awful story. How many more like this?
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
This has been a subject of repeated alarm calls throughout the Plague - and a wave of mortality caused by the near-collapse of non-Covid NHS services would appear, logically, to be inevitable. The only dispute concerns the scale of the damage caused.
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Broadly agree, and I suspect that if we got to (say) November with No Trade Deal in sight, BoJo would find himself no longer Prime Minister. If push came to shove, and without Corbyn, I can just about imagine 40 defectors at the crunch moment.
It's worth remembering that No Trade Deal will do at least some damage to manufacturing industry, which will stuff the Red Wall seats even more than the Southern Shires. In fact, I'm not sure that a trade deal (as opposed to a single market) will be enough; the sheer faff of the extra paperwork will tip some factories over the edge.
So No Deal is a bluff, and not a very good one. The government should have done like 1944, building Operation Fortitude-style fake customs posts staffed by dummy customs officers. We need seamless movement of goods and services, want control of movement of people... what are we prepared to give to get these?
The WA was a total capitulation sold as success. I foresee the trade deal following the same pattern.
Just one day's stats, I know, but I wonder if we are about to see the trend of deaths start to rise again, tracking the rise in cases that began in mid-June?
I was speaking to a former SPAD today and they said the expectation at Westminster and the EU is that it'll be like the withdrawal agreement all over again.
The PM will capitulate to the EU and lie outright (like he did to the ERG and the DUP) about his brilliant new deal.
Oh, I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't help much on this point, which is about the readiness (or rather the near-total unreadiness) of the computer and administrative systems which will be needed irrespective of whether there is a deal. This is true both in government and in the businesses which are going to have to implement all this extra red tape. The situation has of course been made much worse by the fact that Covid-19 will have disrupted the whole public and private sector for months.
The expectation is that apart from FOM it might end up being quite BINO with a long transition period, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Virtual certainty imo.
Purely politically, there's a mad logic to that.
Suppose you've realised that a Brexit Culture War is a good way to keep the old gang together, and that a 2024 election on "Boris's True Brexit vs Starmer's Single Market" is the way to go.
Suppose you know that True Brexit in 2021 will make you Historical Enemy Number One / stop you playing with all the cool toys you've just won. What do you do?
Sign up for a 3 year extension that isn't an extension. Basically exchange Free Movement for any say in the rules. At a bargain price of, say, £250 million per week?
Nothing too bad will happen to the economy. You've saved millions of pounds. You can carry on negotiating new trade deals, in much the same way that Winston Smith worked on the Newspeak dictionary at the end of 1984. And you get another cliff edge to hype everyone up in 2024. What's not to like?
It requires masses of chutzpah to pull it off, but that's one of the things No 10 has in excess...
It contradicts Johnson's 2019 message of the need to 'Get Brexit Done'. Much of the appeal derived from people being heartily sick of the issue and its associated paralysis.If - despite an 80 majority - he has failed to do that, I seriously doubt it will help him electorally by 2024.
That's the corner he's painted himself into, though.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
He basically needs a trade deal, any deal, with the EU to keep Remain voting areas in the South and to deliver an end to free movement to keep the Red Wall.
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
Disagree entirely. That may be good enough for a year or two after the whole “we got a deal wank-a-thon”, but voters will care about unforeseeable side effects of such a deal. Higher unemployment, industry closing down, possible drop in food standards. Who knows.
It’s a risk.
I don't think you can include 'a drop in food standards' as a noticeable effect. Even if we go full 'chlorine chicken', it won't make good food less available, it will just result in more choice, lower prices, and yes, even crappier food at the crappy end.
Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said
So first he charged headlong into knee-jerk kneeling, then he told the press BLM was just a moment and defunding the police was nonsense, then the Wokeists forced him to apologise and declare it a 'defining moment', then he reported himself for ideological re-education, pissing off people with common sense, which turned out to be a 20-minute online course, thus pissing off the Wokeists once again.
Comments
I wonder how many 'old' deaths they are now attributing to covid which were then put down to other causes originally.
For one thing although its not something I care about it involves free movement.
https://twitter.com/MajorMurmer/status/1280921575143936001?s=20
She really doesn't look the part, or talk the part, either. I hate to be mean because I am sure she is a lovely lady, but this is a bad appointment by Starmer
Why didn't he go for Yvette Cooper? Knows her onions, sounds intelligent, has a presence
But what kind of BINO involves not having FOM, we surely cannot get a similar arrangement to now without it.
As indeed have I, and you are right. That,is what I am mocking.
Just another alt-right nutjob on Twitter there, supposedly it's only for lefties but I see tonnes of brainwashed idiots like that one.
On the general point of Dodds, she needs to grow into the role and fast - but who else does Starmer actually have for the post? Reeves perhaps? Cooper?
We want to emphasise that there are lots of people who continue to have symptoms long after they are no longer infectious - this is an area of huge importance, and one that our researchers are very keen to understand better
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/data-update-prevalence-covid
Besides which, the takeaway from PMQs will be Johnson refusing to apologise to care home workers, so no harm done.
But, of course, as some of the previous posters correctly identified, the public is very lacking in its understanding of risk. For example, how many people under current circumstances wouldn't hold the rail going down a flight of stairs in a public building, for fear of getting other people's germs on their hands? And yet falls are also an important cause of death and serious injury. People are trying to protect themselves from a virus that is no longer in mass circulation in most places (and doesn't cause serious illness in most of the people it infects) by undertaking a more risky activity.
It's wise to be alert to the remaining threat still posed by this virus, but you can't let it take over your life.
I think people take a far too black and white view of New Labour. I think it did good and bad things. Some very good things, some very bad things.
I think this current Government has done good things, I think the actual lockdown itself was good but I think since it has gone downhill and we were too slow to implement it. I congratulate the Chancellor on stealing many Labour policies, or at least the spirit of them. Investing is the right thing to do. I just fear it won't last.
I don't feel conflicted by saying any of that. I am a leftie, Labour man but I am very strongly of the view that Tory <> evil like the morons on Twitter would say. I'd even marry one, doesn't much matter to me what political persuasion you're of.
Yes of course a man would get this sort of mockery. See poor Ed Miliband being constantly compared to Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit)
Or see Jacob Rees Mogg and all the brilliantly mean "Victorian undertaker" memes
This isn't a sexist thing, nor a partisan thing. Politicians of all sides and genders get attacked for what they look like and how they talk, and fairly so: people want their leaders to look and sound confident and commanding
If we keep free movement they will either go back to Labour given the loss of the only reason they voted Tory last time or go to the Brexit Party
What do you think of my other question?
Johnson simply isn't a good Commons performer, because he's a terrible orator and can't speak in an intelligent and articulate manner.
Johnson hasn't yet won with an actual killer blow, I can't think of a single put down or strong moment of his.
I don't believe this cabinet is permanent, I believe Starmer is slowly but surely kicking the leftists out of positions of authority. Right now he's establishing himself, then the party comes next. EHRC will give him lots of cover.
Good too, stop the Corbynites, of which I was one. Stop me!
We can do the math(s) easily enough.
To be clear, that's a pretty bad deal, though politically the end of FOM might be a manageable sell. Shadowing EEA, with even less say than Norway gets, has the potential to go wrong in the same way that shadowing ERM did in the late 1980's.
But a kind of EEA minus, for all its dishonesty, might be the best we can hope for from here. Followed in about 20 years time, when the Brexit Generation have joined the Choir Invisible, by a rejoin campaign based on the benefits of Being In The Room.
Honestly Johnson's biggest achievement has been to completely lie and sell the same deal to his party - and the country - with great success.
If we end up in EEA, or Johnson Economic Area (JEA), then I will shake his hand and congratulate him (when it is safe to do so).
To this day I believe his heart isn't really in Brexit
https://in.news.yahoo.com/warning-serious-brain-disorders-people-050001549.html
I also think it is naive. Politicians want to lord it over us, they have to take a lot of stick in return. Them's the rules. Democracy. And it is fair that it is done to all, left or right, men and women.
Also, you really DO want your Chancellor of the Exchequer to sound and look confident and forthright. It is such an important job.
Sunak is good at this aspect (so far). Gordon Brown was good, in a different way: He was the image of a deeply reliable, slightly boring, well educated Edinburgh bank manager, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of your finances (even if the reality was very different).
Starmer shoulda picked Cooper. I presume there was some political reason he couldn't. She's too Blairy or something
But maybe in time.
I don't believe Dodds is permanent.
On topic, the latest Kantar poll puts Trzaskowski a 1.2% lead over Duda (50.6 to 49.4). That's basically a dead heat.
From America, the latest Economist/YouGov poll shows no change from the previous with Biden leading Trump 49-40. The crosstabs are once again huge.
Among men, Trump leads 46-44 but among women Biden is ahead 53-36. Trump leads White voters 50-40 but Biden is well clear with black votes and with Hispanic voters leads 72-19 which is bigger than I've seen in other polls which have shown Trump support among Hispanics up to near 30% so a slight question.
The regional split has Biden up 51-39 in the NE and 54-35 in the West. In the South, Biden leads 47-46 and in the Midwest Biden leads 45-39 which is again slightly out of kilter with some other polls.
The other curiousity is Independents breaking 40-39 for Trump.
I can't see the actual sampling numbers broken down in the cross tabs - could they have over-sampled Democrats and Independents?
She's being set up as a fall person, I am almost sure of it.
Starmer is a schemer.
William Hague was compared to a foetus by a Labour minister back in the day.
I could go on.
I was watching Professor Alice Roberts (eye candy for the older man) explaining the role of the town of Dover during WW2 on TV last night.
There was much footage of Churchill. The man's oratory was very impressive. Whatever superlatives you read on here about Johnson, he is no Churchill, not even a Poundland Churchill.
I don't know if anyone else feels the same but to my eyes Dodds always looks like she's going to start crying. Its unfortunate and not something to judge someone for though.
The big work has not so far been what he's done publicly, it's that quietly he's pretty much got full control over the party and nobody seems to have noticed.
The left is currently eating itself alive and attacking each other and the right thinks they've got another Blairite.
He's probably in the most stable and influential position of any leader since Blair. It's his party now.
William had some positives, and would I prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent.
Quite a few lit crits believe these specific lines - "the blood dimmed tide" - are a reference to the disease
Starmer made such a misstep with this, he should have just stuck to what he originally said
Hague was the worst Tory leader of the last 100 years, he is a great writer and speaker though
They're also unwilling to do any research, especially if it involves numbers, to inform themselves.
And so the '36 areas to get second lockdown within days' bollox we had last week is widely believed.
His support in the Conservative Party and the country is held together by the sticky tape of "Brexit Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might (by following me)." And that Brexit still needs to be kept pretty abstract; he needs the globalists and the localists, and his genius so far has been to keep pretty much everyone onboard. The paranoia has helped, and Remain/Soft Brexit backers did play into his hands last autumn by making it look like Brexit was in peril.
Without the anxiety, or with a specific model that forces some people to say "That's Not My Brexit", the coalition starts to fall apart. Because voters are never grateful in retrospect; ask the ghost of Winston Churchill. So how do you keep the gang together? A temporary bodge for a few years, with the real decision after 2024, is a neat, cynical way of doing that.
"A man has been left fighting for his life after his cancer went undetected when the suspension of many NHS services due to the Covid-19 pandemic meant he had to wait months for a scan."
https://inews.co.uk/news/father-terminal-coronavirus-delay-cancer-diagnosis-498126
Like I said " I would prefer him to still be Tory leader rather than the current incumbent"!
Few voters care about regulatory alignment on widget making bar obsessives
"Sorry Keir, unconscious bias training is bunk
We all need to confront our prejudices but this corporate bandwagon is an easy and meaningless get-out-of-jail card
David Aaronovitch" (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/starmer-is-wasting-his-time-on-unconscious-bias-training-73czvctgw
Some of those voters might flip if they are less scared of Starmer than they were Corbyn, which seems likely.
Needless to say, he's staying close to home. Which BTW is just blocks from CHOP.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53300784
Delays to cancer diagnosis and treatment due to coronavirus could cause thousands of excess deaths in the UK within a year, research suggests.
Scientists suggest there could be at least 7,000 additional deaths - but in a worst case scenario that number could be as high as 35,000.
If we have a trade deal with the EU they are less likely to go to Starmer or the LDs than on WTO Terms
The world has changed perhaps irrevocably and yet Sunak and some on here think with enough "free money" we can go back to January 1st and start living as though the last 6 months haven't happened.
The world has changed - there has been a revolution but it's nothing to do with statues or being "woke", it's far more fundamental than that. It's the end of the commute, the end of the back office, the end of half a century or more of working practices.
It's as fundamental a change as was the end of manufacturing industries or the passing of coal mining but this one affects the prosperous south not the north.
Home working is here and it is here to stay. It works for most people most of the time very well and people have discovered they'd rather enjoy a leisurely breakfast than run off to the bus stop or station in the wind and rain to stand on a crowded bus or train with the other drones.
The world has changed.
I'd have liked to see Sunak acknowledge and champion that revolution but he's incapable of that kind of vision. Like Johnson, he wants to be liked and of course pushing a wheelbarrow full of free money down the street will win you plenty of friends but he needs to be more than that if he is ever going to be taken seriously as a future Prime Minister.
Capitalism is brutal, it encourages adaptation, resourceful thinking and new ways of doing things. It punishes inertia and praises innovation. If jobs and businesses go, new ones will be created. If there are no jobs where you are, as has been done since the Industrial Revolution, you go from where you are to where the jobs and the money are.
Half filling up restaurants on a Monday to Wednesday through August may make some feel better but it delays the inevitable and prolongs the agony just as extending and tweaking furlough does. I'd rather see the largesse spent on job creation than job preservation, recognising we live in a new world and there are opportunities aplenty for those willing to take the risk.
Yes, that's the "risk" - it's not about being told you're frightened or language like "cowering", it's about offering help to those with entrepreneurial vision to take advantage of new technology and new ideas.
Sunak, despite being a Leaver, brings home the Southern Tories, the flip side to that is he loses the blue wall (primarily because he is not Johnson). Johnson on the other hand keeps the blue wall and loses the South.
None of this matters if the economy fails.
Would much prefer to think you're falling overly for the "Dom" hype.
And I do - I think - think that.
Not Free Movement. Just movement that is free. Huzzah!
Tyson and BigRich haven`t posted for ages. Hope they are OK.
Blair, rather like Johnson, may end up having his administration defined by an event far beyond his control. Blair's second term was irrevocably changed by 9/11 - had that not happened, I think he would have enjoyed a third landslide over the Conservatives and retired on his won terms.
Johnson may end up being defined by Covid-19 which wasn't his fault in any sense. How he has and continues to respond to the ramifications of the virus will be as significant as how Blair responded to the 9/11 attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England#South_East_England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_United_Kingdom_general_election_in_England#South_West_England
It's worth remembering that No Trade Deal will do at least some damage to manufacturing industry, which will stuff the Red Wall seats even more than the Southern Shires. In fact, I'm not sure that a trade deal (as opposed to a single market) will be enough; the sheer faff of the extra paperwork will tip some factories over the edge.
So No Deal is a bluff, and not a very good one. The government should have done like 1944, building Operation Fortitude-style fake customs posts staffed by dummy customs officers. We need seamless movement of goods and services, want control of movement of people... what are we prepared to give to get these?
It’s a risk.
The British sense of fairness has always been pretty strong - they saw the system being gamed by some EU movers. It didn't go down well.
The Government must improve Brexit voters lives. If they do not, then who knows what will happen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/opinion/biden-trump-debate.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Just one day's stats, I know, but I wonder if we are about to see the trend of deaths start to rise again, tracking the rise in cases that began in mid-June?
Don't get me wrong, I hope we don't let in chlorine chicken, and don't anticipate the negative effects you outline, but were those things to hit, the food one wouldn't be a noticeable drawback. It'd be counted as a plus.
I think we might be able to get 3 points tonight ...
Forensic, indeed!