183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
This is an example of my least favourite sort of journalism, which starts the report by telling you how to think about it ('anger as...). It's not just the Guardian which does it, of course. MSNBC are the worst offenders.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
They're literally complaining that the UK is demonstrably less racist than they thought, a most peculiar reaction if the point of the anti-racism movement is to actually, er, reduce racism in a country, rather than to provide grievance platforms for activists in perpetuity...
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Yesterday was the first day since 6th of September that Wales reported under 100 cases, and today they're 35% lower than yesterday! Scaled up to population, Welsh cases equate to 1,250 at UK level.
Given Easter hols started and likely reduction in the LFD positives (currently over 50% of total) we could be looking at very sharp case falls over the next week. Zoe just had it's first big fall in a week or so today too. All looking rather good, and to be expected with over 60% of the population positive for anti-bodies now.
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
We should see some significant increases in Germany after the Easter break - next week and the week after. 500k a day? I would be very disappointed if that wasn't reached within 2 weeks (less at weekends of course...)
"Call for prisoners to pick up roadside litter rejected by minister
Published 01 July 2018
A councillor's suggestion that prisoners should clear roadside litter has been met with an "absolutely nonsensical" response by Michael Gove’s office. Cllr Ashley Clark (Con) wrote a letter to the government minister hoping he would agree that convicts should don high-vis jackets and clear waste across the sides of the A2 and Thanet Way.
But the response sent on behalf of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been blasted as "a joke". The letter, written by ministerial contact Sherife Tekdal, states that if convicts are used to collect rubbish then an unfair stigma that all volunteer litter-pickers are criminals will be created. It reads: “It is often recommended that those found guilty of littering should be required to participate in litter‑picking, and we recognise the obvious attraction of making the punishment fit the crime.
“We also want to encourage voluntary and community-led litter-picking activity and do not wish to discourage volunteers by implying that litter-picking is a punishment in itself. “The use of litter-picking as a sanction in itself must be handled with care, to avoid creating a perception that anyone seen litter-picking must be an offender serving a community sentence, which could deter law-abiding citizens from volunteering to take part in these activities.
“Community payback, previously community service, is therefore best used in circumstances in which volunteers are unlikely to be operating, including tackling issues on private land, or to address persistent or large-scale problems.” Disappointed Cllr Clark says the response is "pathetic drivel"."
Many years ago (>30 I think) a prison strike led to some category 3 prisoners living in a nearby army camp. While they were there they came out and litter picked and tidied our winterbourne stream. It was great. Not a chain gang with the connotations of that, but citizens giving back to society.
What happened to NACRO?
They used (chooses word carefully) nearly ex-cons to rebuild the stone wall around our local churchyard a few years ago. It was a very good job.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
Hmm, what happens if we "go native"?
I'm an "enlightened" living among the deplorables, but, well, I don't know if it's related to living here, but I'm less pro-EU than I was and simply can't wait to get my Boris-jab
It would be more worrying if your feelings about the EU had changed after your Boris jab.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
I was just going off this screenshot. I didn't confirm it.
I don't know the French reporting cycle - could that be reporting for several days together, because of the weekend?
There was a technical error which meant some deaths went unreported for 10 days then got reported at once. Worldometer spreads those deaths out among preceding days. I don’t know if that’s the issue with this graph specifically but it seems to happen often with french Covid death reporting.
The current wave in France will play out differently than the UKs January wave because the most vulnerable have received at least 1 vaccine dose already, so I don’t think deaths will rise as much. The ICU occupation is shooting up though because the patients are much younger than previous waves, so each one spends longer in intensive care than an elderly person (but has a better chance of recovering).
The problem is that that there are enough people over 50 who haven't been vaccinated to completely over run every ICU.
And once the ICUs are over run, bad stuff happened, fast.
This is the reason that the government in the UK isn't rushing to re-open either.
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.
The problem is perhaps that I am happy with community organistion, but as soon as I learn that it is a pig's bladder on a stick for a political party I will look for an alternative.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
You seem to think the people left involved in the Labour party care more about socialism that transgender toilets. Doesn't look like it to me.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
I think Sir Keir’s fans have given up on him now to be honest - they no longer talk of him winning, but instead compare his current bad polling to Corbyn’s worst poll or polls when Corbyn had left and the leadership race was being run.
“Maybe he might get us back to were we were under Miliband or Brown” kind of talk.
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Because for some people - especially self-described centrists - Boris causes a logic error in their brain that makes rational evaluation of his electoral appeal impossible. He could win again in 2024 and 2029, and they'd still underestimate him. 'Oh, he just got lucky again', 'The media conspired against our immensely boring candidate', 'That 10-point bounce just came out of nowhere'...
I don't underestimate him. He is electoral gold. The most prescient post I have ever written on here was my early call of the Con landslide with 3 big reasons highlighted - one of them being the star power of Brand "Boris".
Come on, I'd never insult you so badly as to call you a centrist...
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
The UK is one of the most welcoming, tolerant non-racist countries that there is - indeed non-racism is baked in to the liberal democracy that we enjoy. This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying.
British people take deep offence by the suggestion by some, e.g. BLM, Markle that we are racist and the fact that the LP went along with this deluded narrative rather than standing up and defiantly defending our country against such absurd charges is going to bite it in the arse for a long time to come.
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.
The problem is perhaps that I am happy with community organistion, but as soon as I learn that it is a pig's bladder on a stick for a political party I will look for an alternative.
Maurice Glasmans idea of Blue Labour could win. It’s what @leon has described. I’d like to vote for it
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
I think that's partly fair but another factor is that the country, as Blair knew, is at root conservative (ideologically).
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
I think you overestimate the country's conservatism. If you look at the last 50 years, many things treasured by conservatives (small c) have been overturned. Examples include attitudes to sex and sexuality, changes to family life/marriage and the role of women, the declining influence of religious belief, a radical reduction in overt racism and discrimination, and much else. Hardly anybody now, for example, believes that a woman's (mother's) place is in the home, that women should be paid less than men, that homosexuality is deviant, or that black people are inferior - but these beliefs were commonplace not so long ago.
If you were to say that currently, and for the last few years, many people think that social change has gone far enough, you may be right.
Am I the only one who sees a switch in support? Labour need a reset.
I agree.
I was reading a good piece in yesterday's Times by Hugo Rifkind on the 'Mondeo Man'.
The key to that stereotype for Labour was aspiration. They totally got it: to be the party of aspiration. They weren't sneering, they weren't lecturing or (even worse) hectoring. They were promising to be the party for those who wanted to improve life.
Now I don't know exactly what aspiration looks like right now but I'm pretty sure of one thing. Labour aren't offering it.
Tony Blair was a marketing dream. He had a telegenic smile. He was easy going. Had a very astute common touch. He was totally at ease with wealth creation whether individual or corporate and he added to all of this social liberty. Cool Britannia was a marvel.
I'm afraid that the current Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer isn't even revolving in the same galaxy. That's not largely or even in part his fault. The party just doesn't know what it stands for right now.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
They're literally complaining that the UK is demonstrably less racist than they thought, a most peculiar reaction if the point of the anti-racism movement is to actually, er, reduce racism in a country, rather than to provide grievance platforms for activists in perpetuity...
No, the point of a movement for some is to have and sustain a cause celebre, not to actually affect change. After all, if you solve the problem, you do yourself out of a career.
Posted that story earlier. The interesting thing is that they are also proposing the exclusion of Switzerland - who were not, I think, excluded from Gallileo ?
Is it not a breach of the agreement we signed with them ?
It’s apparently being driven by the French, with misgivings in Germany, Holland, Scandi, etc.
It is clear now that France wants to use Brexit to make the EU quasi-hostile to the UK, even if this disbenefits the EU. Madness, but there it is
The inevitable corollary is that we will steer much closer to the US, Canada, Oz, the West divides into two, and the EU grows closer to Moscow and Beijing.
Cf Sputnik5
The old saw is that since the founding of the Fifth Republic, every succeeding French President has been worse than his predecessor. I had thought that trend must, surely, end with Hollande. Who could possibly be worse? Well, we have the answer, don't we? Which leaves the question, who is being prepped up to succeed Macron?
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Because for some people - especially self-described centrists - Boris causes a logic error in their brain that makes rational evaluation of his electoral appeal impossible. He could win again in 2024 and 2029, and they'd still underestimate him. 'Oh, he just got lucky again', 'The media conspired against our immensely boring candidate', 'That 10-point bounce just came out of nowhere'...
I don't underestimate him. He is electoral gold. The most prescient post I have ever written on here was my early call of the Con landslide with 3 big reasons highlighted - one of them being the star power of Brand "Boris".
It's as hard to see Johnson losing an election as it is as hard to imagine Blair ever losing one (and Clinton).
I must admit that I dislike these charisma type leaders because I think they are dangerous in that the electorate is too easily fooled by them.
I wonder whether we should, like the States, have a two-term maximum tenure?
Blair did of course lose his first election - by-election in mega safe tory seat.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
I think Sir Keir’s fans have given up on him now to be honest - they no longer talk of him winning, but instead compare his current bad polling to Corbyn’s worst poll or polls when Corbyn had left and the leadership race was being run.
“Maybe he might get us back to were we were under Miliband or Brown” kind of talk.
To be fair I think Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer does understand the problem. At least partly. Hence his embrace of the flag, however cringe.
Now he has to produce the policies. They should be Blue Labour. People will accept a more expensive nanny state if that nanny state makes our streets safer, our cities cleaner, borders secure - if daily life feels incrementally but obviously better. You don’t have to do much to earn voter gratitude.
People won’t accept a more expensive nanny state if they think their money will just be wasted on insane projects to encourage more Traveller folk to visit institutionally racist arboretums
Posted that story earlier. The interesting thing is that they are also proposing the exclusion of Switzerland - who were not, I think, excluded from Gallileo ?
Is it not a breach of the agreement we signed with them ?
It’s apparently being driven by the French, with misgivings in Germany, Holland, Scandi, etc.
It is clear now that France wants to use Brexit to make the EU quasi-hostile to the UK, even if this disbenefits the EU. Madness, but there it is
The inevitable corollary is that we will steer much closer to the US, Canada, Oz, the West divides into two, and the EU grows closer to Moscow and Beijing.
Cf Sputnik5
The old saw is that since the founding of the Fifth Republic, every succeeding French President has been worse than his predecessor. I had thought that trend must, surely, end with Hollande. Who could possibly be worse? Well, we have the answer, don't we? Which leaves the question, who is being prepped up to succeed Macron?
As the days pass, it does seem like Project Ecksit is less about freeing Scotland from the bonds of serfdom and more about sticking it to Nippy, at any cost...
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
The UK is one of the most welcoming, tolerant non-racist countries that there is - indeed non-racism is baked in to the liberal democracy that we enjoy. This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying.
British people take deep offence by the suggestion by some, e.g. BLM, Markle that we are racist and the fact that the LP went along with this deluded narrative rather than standing up and defiantly defending our country against such absurd charges is going to bite it in the arse for a long time to come.
The Queen of Woke has words for people like you...
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
Labour under Blair (at least at the beginning) didn't scare me.
I sat out a number of elections as neither party attracted me
Today even though Corbyn has gone the loons are still there biding their time.
Until that's sorted I will vote for the party most likely to keep them out - so my vote Blue is actually an anti Labour vote.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
I think Sir Keir’s fans have given up on him now to be honest - they no longer talk of him winning, but instead compare his current bad polling to Corbyn’s worst poll or polls when Corbyn had left and the leadership race was being run.
“Maybe he might get us back to were we were under Miliband or Brown” kind of talk.
To be fair I think Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer does understand the problem. At least partly. Hence his embrace of the flag, however cringe.
Now he has to produce the policies. They should be Blue Labour. People will accept a more expensive nanny state if that nanny state makes our streets safer, our cities cleaner, borders secure - if daily life feels incrementally but obviously better. You don’t have to do much to earn voter gratitude.
People won’t accept a more expensive nanny state if they think their money will just be wasted on insane projects to encourage more Traveller folk to visit institutionally racist arboretums
Yes, Blue Labour.
Have you listened to Maurice Glasman? Ed Miliband was going to go with this, but chickened out.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
This is an example of my least favourite sort of journalism, which starts the report by telling you how to think about it ('anger as...). It's not just the Guardian which does it, of course. MSNBC are the worst offenders.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's funny because my memory of Blair is he did the opposite.
He was all about being modern not old fashioned, did loads for (then) woke issues like gay rights, hate crimes, set up equalities commission etc.
We used to have an Upper Ten Thousand, who were the aristocracy and their scions.
We now have an Upper Ten Thousand who believe in themselves as the sacred tribe, anointed by God to their position.
I sometimes find it hard to detect the difference.
The difference is today's elite believes it is there entirely through its own efforts instead of by accident and therefore doesn't care as much about everyone else.
As opposed to the aristocrats who believed that they were there because of the Divine Order of things instead of by accident and therefore didn't care as much about everyone else.
Or the thousand families who cared deeply for their little patch of England and the people who lived there? The unsung heroes of the squirearchy.
As the days pass, it does seem like Project Ecksit is less about freeing Scotland from the bonds of serfdom and more about sticking it to Nippy, at any cost...
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's funny because my memory of Blair is he did the opposite.
He was all about being modern not old fashioned, did loads for (then) woke issues like gay rights, hate crimes, set up equalities commission etc.
Does anybody have any updates on the trials of that inhaler device that kills Covid whilst it's in its hibernation stage at the back of the throat? That looks extremely promising and could be a game changer.
Edit: They seem to be using NEWS as a secondary outcome, which makes me a bit queasy - NEWS has only been validated for imminent adverse outcomes (death, cardiac arrest, ICU within 24 hours). It's not a general purpose measure of health status, although it increasingly seems to be used as such.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's funny because my memory of Blair is he did the opposite.
He was all about being modern not old fashioned, did loads for (then) woke issues like gay rights, hate crimes, set up equalities commission etc.
He was pro inmigration
But he SOLD it as patriotic firm government. Cool Britannia. Tough on crime, tough on the causes. Etc
He then smuggled through a lot of ‘progressive’ stuff - some good, some bad - because he got the job done. Life seemed to improve. Government was stable. If he hadn’t invaded Iraq he might now be enjoying his seventh term in office
The difference now is that wokery has gone as far as it can and tips into lunacy, so there’s no more mileage in that. Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer will have to find other progressive causes to please his Guardian readers, as he otherwise pursues a blue Labour agenda. If he ever wants to win
We used to have an Upper Ten Thousand, who were the aristocracy and their scions.
We now have an Upper Ten Thousand who believe in themselves as the sacred tribe, anointed by God to their position.
I sometimes find it hard to detect the difference.
The difference is today's elite believes it is there entirely through its own efforts instead of by accident and therefore doesn't care as much about everyone else.
As opposed to the aristocrats who believed that they were there because of the Divine Order of things instead of by accident and therefore didn't care as much about everyone else.
Or the thousand families who cared deeply for their little patch of England and the people who lived there? The unsung heroes of the squirearchy.
A couple of friends out in the great metropolises said for the past few weeks every time they've opened the Deliveroo App it has encouraged them to invest.
There's going to be a bunch of pissed off customers of Deliveroo vowing never to use them again.
Bravo whoever advised Deliveroo on the idea of telling their customers to invest via in app advertising.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
The UK is one of the most welcoming, tolerant non-racist countries that there is - indeed non-racism is baked in to the liberal democracy that we enjoy. This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying.
British people take deep offence by the suggestion by some, e.g. BLM, Markle that we are racist and the fact that the LP went along with this deluded narrative rather than standing up and defiantly defending our country against such absurd charges is going to bite it in the arse for a long time to come.
The Queen of Woke has words for people like you...
Almost every word of that article is wrong. Totally wrong.
This Government is not "riddled with political arthritis". They're bursting with ideas, dealing with the pandemic and getting Britain post-Brexit ready, whether you like that or not.
Targeting the Government's blindspots is the sure way to oblivion. It's a surefire way to end up sidelined: as a fringe lobby group. You cannot win a majority unless you win the central vision of what people want and to which they aspire. Two of the five headings in that piece are about taxing more. Utterly hopeless wayward wilderness wittering.
Labour need a total reset not tinkering around with where they think the Government has weaknesses. They need to target what won the Conservatives the last election and then do it better. That's what Tony Blair did so brilliantly. He took Thatcherism, built on its rip-roaring success and then added some sprinkles of social liberty for which Cool Britannia was ripe and ready.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's at times like this that I realise how out of kilter I am with majority public opinion in the UK. I'm not even in kilter with Twitter opinion.
The market for politics that is broadly capitalistic, reasonably fiscally prudent, liberal on social issues, fiercely wedded to civil liberties and not bothered about identity politics or culture war one way or the other seems to dwindle with every passing month. Or perhaps it was never a big market anyway.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Sorry I can't seem to quote from the right poster who spoke of the incompetence of this Government. My reply is:
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
Competent?
You really shouldn't post when high.
Let us take a brief step through all the excess and avoidable deaths when Boris Johnson failed to lockdown quickly enough in September/October and again in December.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
The thing is you could easily justify / sell far more state intervention, unlike say 20 years ago. China has grown incredibly strong, COVID has shown just how over dependent we have become on them and also massive JIT global supply trade, just to shave a few pence of some items.
Labour could easily sell just as we are onshoring vaccination production, we need to do more of this to secure our future and the best way to do this is more state intervention. Hell even me, somebody who is a business owner and big believer that benefits of capitalism massively outweighs the downsides, could get behind some sensible state intervention to ensure we don't have a repeat of COVID situations re supply lines.
Globalisation is resulting in in lots of industries just 2-3-4 companies running everything. ARM being sold to Softbank and now to NVidia is terrible for ARM and Britain. Labour could easily sell we need to protect these industries more and now not in the EU we have more free rein to do so.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
I think that's partly fair but another factor is that the country, as Blair knew, is at root conservative (ideologically).
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
I think you overestimate the country's conservatism. If you look at the last 50 years, many things treasured by conservatives (small c) have been overturned. Examples include attitudes to sex and sexuality, changes to family life/marriage and the role of women, the declining influence of religious belief, a radical reduction in overt racism and discrimination, and much else. Hardly anybody now, for example, believes that a woman's (mother's) place is in the home, that women should be paid less than men, that homosexuality is deviant, or that black people are inferior - but these beliefs were commonplace not so long ago.
If you were to say that currently, and for the last few years, many people think that social change has gone far enough, you may be right.
All those examples you give are changes brought about by liberalism not collectivism.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Isn't Millfield where the poshos send the real Tim Nice But Very Dims.....and then they play rugby for England.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Isn't Millfield where the poshos send the real Tim Nice But Very Dims.....and then they play rugby for England.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Isn't Millfield where the poshos send the real Tim Nice But Very Dims.....and then they play rugby for England.
No, Millfield has an entrance exam, Harrow doesn't, it lets anyone in so long as their parents can afford the fees,
A couple of friends out in the great metropolises said for the past few weeks every time they've opened the Deliveroo App it has encouraged them to invest.
There's going to be a bunch of pissed off customers of Deliveroo vowing never to use them again.
Bravo whoever advised Deliveroo on the idea of telling their customers to invest via in app advertising.
Indeed. I've been getting fairly frequent emails as well.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
The advantage of the BAME/Institutional racism concept is that you don't have to actually solve any problems. Or ask awkward questions.
A couple of friends out in the great metropolises said for the past few weeks every time they've opened the Deliveroo App it has encouraged them to invest.
There's going to be a bunch of pissed off customers of Deliveroo vowing never to use them again.
Bravo whoever advised Deliveroo on the idea of telling their customers to invest via in app advertising.
Indeed. I've been getting fairly frequent emails as well.
It's funny because my memory of Blair is he did the opposite.
He was all about being modern not old fashioned, did loads for (then) woke issues like gay rights, hate crimes, set up equalities commission etc.
He was pro inmigration
But he SOLD it as patriotic firm government. Cool Britannia. Tough on crime, tough on the causes. Etc
He then smuggled through a lot of ‘progressive’ stuff - some good, some bad - because he got the job done. Life seemed to improve. Government was stable. If he hadn’t invaded Iraq he might now be enjoying his seventh term in office
I think that's right. The thing about social reform - gay marriage etc. - is that most people have a view (often surprisingly tolerant) but don't care as much as they do about bread-and-butter issues; the people who do care are mostly passionately in favour. So if you can persuade the majority that the bread and butter will be delivered, they'll take a bit of social stuff with a shrug. Blair didn't conceal the fact that he was going to liberalise gay rights etc., but he didn't go on about it as his central theme.
Starmer believes that we need to establish a base of acceptance that Labour is sensible, patriotic and moderate. Only when he's gone on about that till we're all bored to tears with it can he get a hearing for the good stuff.
I think the line that the party is full of Corbynites just awaiting their moment won't prove durable - certainly in reality the Corbynites have largely either said "Oh well, OK" (which is about where I am) or have gone completely passive or quit altogether. There will always be someone somewhere saying something off-message, but people don't pay much attention unless they've actually heard of them - "Councillor Bloggs from Little Snoring says he loves Stalin" doesn't really work..
Sorry I can't seem to quote from the right poster who spoke of the incompetence of this Government. My reply is:
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
The UK government has certainly stepped up it's game, and it's only fair to credit them for an impressive vaccine rollout especially when compared with the shambles in Europe. That said, other countries like South Korea, Taiwan or New Zealand have basically managed to avoid endless lockdowns over the last year and life has long since returned to normal for them. Many countries outside of Europe and the Americas have not been hit badly by this after their first waves. They may not be vaccinating as quickly now as the UK but they also don't really need to if there's no virus circulating.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Isn't Millfield where the poshos send the real Tim Nice But Very Dims.....and then they play rugby for England.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The example he gives to show the UK is institutionally racist is one person being racist? I think he needs a dictionary.
The UK is one of the most welcoming, tolerant non-racist countries that there is - indeed non-racism is baked in to the liberal democracy that we enjoy. This is so obvious it shouldn't need saying.
British people take deep offence by the suggestion by some, e.g. BLM, Markle that we are racist and the fact that the LP went along with this deluded narrative rather than standing up and defiantly defending our country against such absurd charges is going to bite it in the arse for a long time to come.
This +++++++
The people who are out saying the UK is institutionally racist are those who are in the Anti Racism industry.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's at times like this that I realise how out of kilter I am with majority public opinion in the UK. I'm not even in kilter with Twitter opinion.
The market for politics that is broadly capitalistic, reasonably fiscally prudent, liberal on social issues, fiercely wedded to civil liberties and not bothered about identity politics or culture war one way or the other seems to dwindle with every passing month. Or perhaps it was never a big market anyway.
If you're fiercely wedded to civil liberties, I'm not sure how you can not be 'bothered about the culture war one way or the other' - it is already lapping at the toes of civil liberties - freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion, etc.
I always like the Henning Wehn joke about xenophobia in Britain.....
"People talk about Britain being a racist and xenophobic country, I have actually found that Britain is an incredibly tolerant country. Since I moved here from Germany, I have found it much more tolerant than Germany.....I mean you don't like us foreigners, but you definitely tolerant us"....
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Isn't Millfield where the poshos send the real Tim Nice But Very Dims.....and then they play rugby for England.
I don't think Roger played rugby for England....
France, maybe.
Yeah but he's never had a proper job either, like all the sportmen it produces ;-)
Sorry I can't seem to quote from the right poster who spoke of the incompetence of this Government. My reply is:
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
That's true for as long as the UK is vaccinated and most other places aren't. But my working hypothesis is that many people are overestimating how for how long that will be the case. At current rates, the UK is about 3 months ahead of Europe. But as production ramps up (it's in the pipes now and due to hit the streets next week), that'll shrink. Double the rate, and the 3 month lead takes 6 weeks to catch up. (Back of envelope check: that would be herd immunity in UK early June, Europe mid-July. Full vaccination here mid July, there end of August. Given the UK noises about April being the month of second shots (bugger; I'm late 40's), that sounds about right.)
And then what? The government has got a vaccine glow, and it broadly deserves one. But I can't see how it relies on that all the way to 2024. The economy is still in a bad way, Rishi's budget doesn't look robust. Word in the staffroom is that this year's GCSE and A Level results could be as big a mess as last year's. Kate Bingham can't run everything.
We used to have an Upper Ten Thousand, who were the aristocracy and their scions.
We now have an Upper Ten Thousand who believe in themselves as the sacred tribe, anointed by God to their position.
I sometimes find it hard to detect the difference.
The difference is today's elite believes it is there entirely through its own efforts instead of by accident and therefore doesn't care as much about everyone else.
As opposed to the aristocrats who believed that they were there because of the Divine Order of things instead of by accident and therefore didn't care as much about everyone else.
Or the thousand families who cared deeply for their little patch of England and the people who lived there? The unsung heroes of the squirearchy.
Well, that is one view....
The aristos and the squirearchy are not the same...
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
I’ve told you how to fix Labour. Forget Wokery and ID politics. Forget transgender toilets.
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
It's at times like this that I realise how out of kilter I am with majority public opinion in the UK. I'm not even in kilter with Twitter opinion.
The market for politics that is broadly capitalistic, reasonably fiscally prudent, liberal on social issues, fiercely wedded to civil liberties and not bothered about identity politics or culture war one way or the other seems to dwindle with every passing month. Or perhaps it was never a big market anyway.
If you're fiercely wedded to civil liberties, I'm not sure how you can not be 'bothered about the culture war one way or the other' - it is already lapping at the toes of civil liberties - freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of religion, etc.
It's a fair point. The right term is probably non-aligned . That doesn't mean either unconcerned by prejudice on the one hand or having no sense of patriotism on the other. It just means not seeing any partisan or tribal advantage to be gained from becoming a combatant.
Of course based on Twitter / Daily Mail that means people like us are both reactionary bigots who should f off to the Tories, and at the same time woke snowflakes who are traitors to the flag.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
I think that's partly fair but another factor is that the country, as Blair knew, is at root conservative (ideologically).
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
I think you overestimate the country's conservatism. If you look at the last 50 years, many things treasured by conservatives (small c) have been overturned. Examples include attitudes to sex and sexuality, changes to family life/marriage and the role of women, the declining influence of religious belief, a radical reduction in overt racism and discrimination, and much else. Hardly anybody now, for example, believes that a woman's (mother's) place is in the home, that women should be paid less than men, that homosexuality is deviant, or that black people are inferior - but these beliefs were commonplace not so long ago.
If you were to say that currently, and for the last few years, many people think that social change has gone far enough, you may be right.
All those examples you give are changes brought about by liberalism not collectivism.
That's a bit of a baffling response - I never mentioned collectivism or liberalism. I was merely mildly disputing your assertion that the country was as ideologically conservative as your original post contended.
Sorry I can't seem to quote from the right poster who spoke of the incompetence of this Government. My reply is:
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
Competent?
You really shouldn't post when high.
Let us take a brief step through all the excess and avoidable deaths when Boris Johnson failed to lockdown quickly enough in September/October and again in December.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Yes - I'd agree with that. Though I think even more important is 4) the stability of your family background. I can think of plenty of people who have overcome disadvantages in category 1, if 2, 3 and especially 4 have been in in place.
The headstart I had in life over my Pakistani-heritage schoolfriend* who also had a comfortable middle class upbringing in a comfortable and stable middle class family and attended a comfortable middle class school in a comfortable middle class suburb in almost non-existent, compared to the headstart we both have over my white colleague who grew up in Skelmersdale and went to a school where any attempt to learn resulted in ostracisation and/or actual violence.
*his father, on the other hand, who managed to achieve this comfortable middle class base after arriving in the country as an illegal immigrant and starting his own business, had to overcome rather more.
Does anybody have any updates on the trials of that inhaler device that kills Covid whilst it's in its hibernation stage at the back of the throat? That looks extremely promising and could be a game changer.
Edit: They seem to be using NEWS as a secondary outcome, which makes me a bit queasy - NEWS has only been validated for imminent adverse outcomes (death, cardiac arrest, ICU within 24 hours). It's not a general purpose measure of health status, although it increasingly seems to be used as such.
I do wonder about regular use of a nasal spray, as described and whether it's a great idea to - presumably - wipe out all sorts of things living in your nose. We know, for example, that antibiotics can play havoc with the balance of gut bacteria and that lactobacilli may have beneficial effects in nose and throat (not sure whether they'd be affected by the treatment).
Sorry I can't seem to quote from the right poster who spoke of the incompetence of this Government. My reply is:
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
Competent?
You really shouldn't post when high.
Let us take a brief step through all the excess and avoidable deaths when Boris Johnson failed to lockdown quickly enough in September/October and again in December.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
I think that's partly fair but another factor is that the country, as Blair knew, is at root conservative (ideologically).
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
I think you overestimate the country's conservatism. If you look at the last 50 years, many things treasured by conservatives (small c) have been overturned. Examples include attitudes to sex and sexuality, changes to family life/marriage and the role of women, the declining influence of religious belief, a radical reduction in overt racism and discrimination, and much else. Hardly anybody now, for example, believes that a woman's (mother's) place is in the home, that women should be paid less than men, that homosexuality is deviant, or that black people are inferior - but these beliefs were commonplace not so long ago.
If you were to say that currently, and for the last few years, many people think that social change has gone far enough, you may be right.
All those examples you give are changes brought about by liberalism not collectivism.
That's a bit of a baffling response - I never mentioned collectivism or liberalism. I was merely mildly disputing your assertion that the country was as ideologically conservative as your original post contended.
Ok - I see now - apologies.
Where I'm coming from is that conservatism is the dominant ideology in the UK followed by liberalism followed by collectivism. Back of a fag packet maybe 45/30/20? (with 5% libertarian?)? The LP attaches to collectivism which is why, I argue, it is struggling.
Does anybody have any updates on the trials of that inhaler device that kills Covid whilst it's in its hibernation stage at the back of the throat? That looks extremely promising and could be a game changer.
Edit: They seem to be using NEWS as a secondary outcome, which makes me a bit queasy - NEWS has only been validated for imminent adverse outcomes (death, cardiac arrest, ICU within 24 hours). It's not a general purpose measure of health status, although it increasingly seems to be used as such.
I do wonder about regular use of a nasal spray, as described and whether it's a great idea to - presumably - wipe out all sorts of things living in your nose. We know, for example, that antibiotics can play havoc with the balance of gut bacteria and that lactobacilli may have beneficial effects in nose and throat (not sure whether they'd be affected by the treatment).
Yes, we have all sorts of little critters living everywhere, including eyelash mites apparently! However, I think under the circumstances, a temporarily nuked nose would be an acceptable sacrifice.
I always like the Henning Wehn joke about xenophobia in Britain.....
"People talk about Britain being a racist and xenophobic country, I have actually found that Britain is an incredibly tolerant country. Since I moved here from Germany, I have found it much more tolerant than Germany.....I mean you don't like us foreigners, but you definitely tolerant us"....
I appreciate this is a joke, but there's a deeper point here - there's nothing 'tolerant' about tolerating something you're keen on to start with. Tolerance is recognising when something is none of your business.
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.
The problem is perhaps that I am happy with community organistion, but as soon as I learn that it is a pig's bladder on a stick for a political party I will look for an alternative.
Ed had lots of ideas - just none of them had any substance behind them.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Yes - I'd agree with that. Though I think even more important is 4) the stability of your family background. I can think of plenty of people who have overcome disadvantages in category 1, if 2, 3 and especially 4 have been in in place.
The headstart I had in life over my Pakistani-heritage schoolfriend* who also had a comfortable middle class upbringing in a comfortable and stable middle class family and attended a comfortable middle class school in a comfortable middle class suburb in almost non-existent, compared to the headstart we both have over my white colleague who grew up in Skelmersdale and went to a school where any attempt to learn resulted in ostracisation and/or actual violence.
*his father, on the other hand, who managed to achieve this comfortable middle class base after arriving in the country as an illegal immigrant and starting his own business, had to overcome rather more.
Yes, 4 and the fact they took an interest in my education.
Made sure I did all the right things, spent time to ensure I did as well.
Also told me that if I worked hard in my education I’d be able to choose a great career and earn serious wonga so I can do and buy whatever I wanted.
I think middle class parents are very pushy in that regards.
At my school I wasn’t the only child whose parents saw anything other than an A as a failure.
Heard this on the radio while driving. The concept that technologies come and go, but primitive war endures always rings true to me. We will always need an infantry, trained in close quarter fighting, able to fight without technology:
The most popular credo on PB is authoritarianism of both left and right, as we have seen in spades recently. Sandy Rentool posts one unpleasantly authoritarian post per day, usually around 11pm, then goes to bed with a hasty "night all" before anyone can challenge him.
The most popular credo on PB is authoritarianism of both left and right, as we have seen in spades recently. Sandy Rentool posts one unpleasantly authoritarian post per day, usually around 11pm, then goes to bed with a hasty "night all" before anyone can challenge him.
If you switched his initials around he would be called Randy Sentool, which is amusing (I think).
The feebleness of the article does highlight the difficulty of a centre left opposition winning against a government spending money like water and only implementing populist/popular policies on a retail level.
The the Government is looking for a post-covid weapon of mass Brexit distraction whilst they sort border issues out, litter could be that issue. It crystallises everything that we love to love, and love to hate.
The most popular credo on PB is authoritarianism of both left and right, as we have seen in spades recently. Sandy Rentool posts one unpleasantly authoritarian post per day, usually around 11pm, then goes to bed with a hasty "night all" before anyone can challenge him.
He is a Conservative trapped in the body of a traditional w/c Labour voter. He is the last brick in the 'red wall' to coin a phrase.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
Yes - I'd agree with that. Though I think even more important is 4) the stability of your family background. I can think of plenty of people who have overcome disadvantages in category 1, if 2, 3 and especially 4 have been in in place.
The headstart I had in life over my Pakistani-heritage schoolfriend* who also had a comfortable middle class upbringing in a comfortable and stable middle class family and attended a comfortable middle class school in a comfortable middle class suburb in almost non-existent, compared to the headstart we both have over my white colleague who grew up in Skelmersdale and went to a school where any attempt to learn resulted in ostracisation and/or actual violence.
*his father, on the other hand, who managed to achieve this comfortable middle class base after arriving in the country as an illegal immigrant and starting his own business, had to overcome rather more.
Yes, 4 and the fact they took an interest in my education.
Made sure I did all the right things, spent time to ensure I did as well.
Also told me that if I worked hard in my education I’d be able to choose a great career and earn serious wonga so I can do and buy whatever I wanted.
I think middle class parents are very pushy in that regards.
At my school I wasn’t the only child whose parents saw anything other than an A as a failure.
I got 4 As and and E at A Level. My father's reaction? "What happened with the E?" [Advanced Maths - took Maths a year early, lost interest, thought I could wing it without doing the work, was wrong].
The most popular credo on PB is authoritarianism of both left and right, as we have seen in spades recently. Sandy Rentool posts one unpleasantly authoritarian post per day, usually around 11pm, then goes to bed with a hasty "night all" before anyone can challenge him.
If you switched his initials around he would be called Randy Sentool, which is amusing (I think).
Comments
Go back to old fashioned socialism with an authoritarian tinge. Community pride. Clean streets. Tough on crime. Tough on borders because that’s the law. Taxes might go up but it means safer cities.
You can sell mild socialism if you wrap it in a patriotic bow and with practical policies that will make daily life better. Ignore the bloody Guardian
Blair got this
Given Easter hols started and likely reduction in the LFD positives (currently over 50% of total) we could be looking at very sharp case falls over the next week. Zoe just had it's first big fall in a week or so today too. All looking rather good, and to be expected with over 60% of the population positive for anti-bodies now.
They used (chooses word carefully) nearly ex-cons to rebuild the stone wall around our local churchyard a few years ago. It was a very good job.
And once the ICUs are over run, bad stuff happened, fast.
This is the reason that the government in the UK isn't rushing to re-open either.
Here is a Labour List interview from 2013.
https://labourlist.org/2013/04/ed-miliband-interview-part-two-on-selections-community-organising-and-the-future-of-the-labour-party/
The problem is perhaps that I am happy with community organistion, but as soon as I learn that it is a pig's bladder on a stick for a political party I will look for an alternative.
“Maybe he might get us back to were we were under Miliband or Brown” kind of talk.
British people take deep offence by the suggestion by some, e.g. BLM, Markle that we are racist and the fact that the LP went along with this deluded narrative rather than standing up and defiantly defending our country against such absurd charges is going to bite it in the arse for a long time to come.
https://youtu.be/LgYpxVW2CXk
If you were to say that currently, and for the last few years, many people think that social change has gone far enough, you may be right.
I was reading a good piece in yesterday's Times by Hugo Rifkind on the 'Mondeo Man'.
The key to that stereotype for Labour was aspiration. They totally got it: to be the party of aspiration. They weren't sneering, they weren't lecturing or (even worse) hectoring. They were promising to be the party for those who wanted to improve life.
Now I don't know exactly what aspiration looks like right now but I'm pretty sure of one thing. Labour aren't offering it.
Tony Blair was a marketing dream. He had a telegenic smile. He was easy going. Had a very astute common touch. He was totally at ease with wealth creation whether individual or corporate and he added to all of this social liberty. Cool Britannia was a marvel.
I'm afraid that the current Labour Party under Sir Keir Starmer isn't even revolving in the same galaxy. That's not largely or even in part his fault. The party just doesn't know what it stands for right now.
https://twitter.com/aameranwar/status/1377151404809195526?s=21
Now he has to produce the policies. They should be Blue Labour. People will accept a more expensive nanny state if that nanny state makes our streets safer, our cities cleaner, borders secure - if daily life feels incrementally but obviously better. You don’t have to do much to earn voter gratitude.
People won’t accept a more expensive nanny state if they think their money will just be wasted on insane projects to encourage more Traveller folk to visit institutionally racist arboretums
“ How Starmer can beat the Tories
Labour must ruthlessly target the Government's blindspots”
https://unherd.com/2021/03/what-are-the-tory-weak-spots/
Very good
https://twitter.com/PriyamvadaGopal/status/1377181616750006280
I sat out a number of elections as neither party attracted me
Today even though Corbyn has gone the loons are still there biding their time.
Until that's sorted I will vote for the party most likely to keep them out - so my vote Blue is actually an anti Labour vote.
Have you listened to Maurice Glasman? Ed Miliband was going to go with this, but chickened out.
https://youtu.be/Pa5vsa1FLKY
He was all about being modern not old fashioned, did loads for (then) woke issues like gay rights, hate crimes, set up equalities commission etc.
He was pro inmigration
The UK probably has the most competent government in the world right now with the sole exception of Israel.
In the only thing which actually matters for everyone's wellbeing: mental, physical, social and economic.
Looks like Angus Brendan MacNeil is staying on his horse.
https://twitter.com/afrazzledscot/status/1377218372417556483?s=21
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/03/31/deliveroo-backers-lose-2bn-one-worst-market-debuts-record/
https://twitter.com/matthewsyed/status/1377225246906929152?s=21
I see from the above that it's not an inhaler, it's a nasal spray, so sorry for the misleading info in the question.
He then smuggled through a lot of ‘progressive’ stuff - some good, some bad - because he got the job done. Life seemed to improve. Government was stable. If he hadn’t invaded Iraq he might now be enjoying his seventh term in office
The difference now is that wokery has gone as far as it can and tips into lunacy, so there’s no more mileage in that. Sir Kir ‘Royale’ Starmer will have to find other progressive causes to please his Guardian readers, as he otherwise pursues a blue Labour agenda. If he ever wants to win
I presume mini-Trump is going to lock down France properly?
There's going to be a bunch of pissed off customers of Deliveroo vowing never to use them again.
Bravo whoever advised Deliveroo on the idea of telling their customers to invest via in app advertising.
https://twitter.com/rjwilx/status/1376975845026377729?s=21
If she sinks.... next contestant!
This Government is not "riddled with political arthritis". They're bursting with ideas, dealing with the pandemic and getting Britain post-Brexit ready, whether you like that or not.
Targeting the Government's blindspots is the sure way to oblivion. It's a surefire way to end up sidelined: as a fringe lobby group. You cannot win a majority unless you win the central vision of what people want and to which they aspire. Two of the five headings in that piece are about taxing more. Utterly hopeless wayward wilderness wittering.
Labour need a total reset not tinkering around with where they think the Government has weaknesses. They need to target what won the Conservatives the last election and then do it better. That's what Tony Blair did so brilliantly. He took Thatcherism, built on its rip-roaring success and then added some sprinkles of social liberty for which Cool Britannia was ripe and ready.
The market for politics that is broadly capitalistic, reasonably fiscally prudent, liberal on social issues, fiercely wedded to civil liberties and not bothered about identity politics or culture war one way or the other seems to dwindle with every passing month. Or perhaps it was never a big market anyway.
I've said on here many times that my life outcomes were determined by
1) The profession of my father and grandparents
2) Where I lived
3) The schools my parents chose (and paid for)
To lump me in some black kid on sink estate in London who goes to a bog standard comprehensive because we're in the catch all term BAME is ridiculous.
Obviously my talents helped a lot as well, as Harrow shows just because your parents pay huge school fees it still doesn't help if you're thick as pig poo.
You really shouldn't post when high.
Let us take a brief step through all the excess and avoidable deaths when Boris Johnson failed to lockdown quickly enough in September/October and again in December.
Something he has sorted of admitted himself.
Labour could easily sell just as we are onshoring vaccination production, we need to do more of this to secure our future and the best way to do this is more state intervention. Hell even me, somebody who is a business owner and big believer that benefits of capitalism massively outweighs the downsides, could get behind some sensible state intervention to ensure we don't have a repeat of COVID situations re supply lines.
Globalisation is resulting in in lots of industries just 2-3-4 companies running everything. ARM being sold to Softbank and now to NVidia is terrible for ARM and Britain. Labour could easily sell we need to protect these industries more and now not in the EU we have more free rein to do so.
Starmer believes that we need to establish a base of acceptance that Labour is sensible, patriotic and moderate. Only when he's gone on about that till we're all bored to tears with it can he get a hearing for the good stuff.
I think the line that the party is full of Corbynites just awaiting their moment won't prove durable - certainly in reality the Corbynites have largely either said "Oh well, OK" (which is about where I am) or have gone completely passive or quit altogether. There will always be someone somewhere saying something off-message, but people don't pay much attention unless they've actually heard of them - "Councillor Bloggs from Little Snoring says he loves Stalin" doesn't really work..
France, maybe.
The people who are out saying the UK is institutionally racist are those who are in the Anti Racism industry.
https://order-order.com/2021/03/31/nandy-insists-uk-is-institutionally-racist-despite-report/
Fuck off Labour
"People talk about Britain being a racist and xenophobic country, I have actually found that Britain is an incredibly tolerant country. Since I moved here from Germany, I have found it much more tolerant than Germany.....I mean you don't like us foreigners, but you definitely tolerant us"....
And then what? The government has got a vaccine glow, and it broadly deserves one. But I can't see how it relies on that all the way to 2024. The economy is still in a bad way, Rishi's budget doesn't look robust. Word in the staffroom is that this year's GCSE and A Level results could be as big a mess as last year's. Kate Bingham can't run everything.
Of course based on Twitter / Daily Mail that means people like us are both reactionary bigots who should f off to the Tories, and at the same time woke snowflakes who are traitors to the flag.
I can think of plenty of people who have overcome disadvantages in category 1, if 2, 3 and especially 4 have been in in place.
The headstart I had in life over my Pakistani-heritage schoolfriend* who also had a comfortable middle class upbringing in a comfortable and stable middle class family and attended a comfortable middle class school in a comfortable middle class suburb in almost non-existent, compared to the headstart we both have over my white colleague who grew up in Skelmersdale and went to a school where any attempt to learn resulted in ostracisation and/or actual violence.
*his father, on the other hand, who managed to achieve this comfortable middle class base after arriving in the country as an illegal immigrant and starting his own business, had to overcome rather more.
Ashford and St Peters NHS Trust have a page
https://www.ashfordstpeters.nhs.uk/latest-news/2610-covid-busting-nasal-spray-begins-uk-trials
which also mentions trials for already ill patients inhaling nitric oxide (different application of a similar thing).
I do wonder about regular use of a nasal spray, as described and whether it's a great idea to - presumably - wipe out all sorts of things living in your nose. We know, for example, that antibiotics can play havoc with the balance of gut bacteria and that lactobacilli may have beneficial effects in nose and throat (not sure whether they'd be affected by the treatment).
Where I'm coming from is that conservatism is the dominant ideology in the UK followed by liberalism followed by collectivism. Back of a fag packet maybe 45/30/20? (with 5% libertarian?)? The LP attaches to collectivism which is why, I argue, it is struggling.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-league/56584714
The Six Ells.
Leans left
Largely liberal
Loosely libertarian
Who will stand up for the Six Ells?
Made sure I did all the right things, spent time to ensure I did as well.
Also told me that if I worked hard in my education I’d be able to choose a great career and earn serious wonga so I can do and buy whatever I wanted.
I think middle class parents are very pushy in that regards.
At my school I wasn’t the only child whose parents saw anything other than an A as a failure.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/18/978832042/years-of-military-service-helped-inform-2034-a-novel-of-the-next-world-war
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1377246142476468224?s=19