Chuka Umunna was a real waste of someone who clearly had something to offer. He is, as is pointed out, charismatic and he also seemed a very capable performer. Something the Labour Party really struggle for these days. It’s a pity for politics he opted out.
Labours front bench is full of poor performers. The worst of which has to be Kate Green. When faced against the most inept education secretary in many many years she’s not made a dent. Her most memorable comments have been around changing the name of an OBE to remove empire from the name and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’. Both of which may be worthwhile long term aims but short term she needs to get stuck in.
I'll see your Kate Green. And raise you Anneliese Dodd.
The first female Labour politician to hold the post of either shadow or actual Chancellor. Green might be awful, but at least she won't have held back the cause of Labour having its first female leader.
It's been extremely difficult for opposition politicians of any stripe to 'break through' recently, as the pandemic has been 'front and centre'. Now we can hope that that is receding, political life will more more normal, and, importantly, Parliament can return for proper debates and questions, and politicians and journalists can deal properly with such matters as the iniquitous Police and Crime, and rapidly developing car-crash which is Brexit.
(Note to Ydoethur (proof-read!)
Always mañana with Labour - where do they think they are? Spain!
The Government always said it would follow a national approach, and if there is something like a normal distribution of virus levels, that would make sense. Why would scientists expect a flat distribution?
This time last year, my central heating had been off for a month.
Today, it’s snowing.
Failed to restart at Headingly because of snow. Glamorgan coach said it had never happened to him before. Might have saved Yorkshire's blushes, though.
LOL, been a while since I recall snow stopping play in a cricket match!
Chuka Umunna was a real waste of someone who clearly had something to offer. He is, as is pointed out, charismatic and he also seemed a very capable performer. Something the Labour Party really struggle for these days. It’s a pity for politics he opted out.
Labours front bench is full of poor performers. The worst of which has to be Kate Green. When faced against the most inept education secretary in many many years she’s not made a dent. Her most memorable comments have been around changing the name of an OBE to remove empire from the name and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’. Both of which may be worthwhile long term aims but short term she needs to get stuck in.
I'll see your Kate Green. And raise you Anneliese Dodd.
The first female Labour politician to hold the post of either shadow or actual Chancellor. Green might be awful, but at least she won't have held back the cause of Labour having its first female leader.
I had high hopes of Dodds too but she is missing in action. She’s really really bright and the shadow chancellor role should be a breeze for her but she’s just totally ineffective, it just shows being smart is not enough.
It’s hard to see who they’d put in there to be honest. Reeves ? I can’t say I find her a warm person but she may do a good job. It was said the Corbyn shadow cabinet was ineffective and replace him and the talent would come flooding back. It is yet to be seen.
Being seen by many as un-patriotic is a pretty disastrous position for Labour to be in when you consider that working-class people are probably more likely to be serving in, are have served in, the armed forces. But that may not be true in the big cities and university towns, where most Labour activists are situated.
"Unpatriotic" is also a really hard thing to shake off. You can pose behind a billion flags but if one single MP says something daft and anti-British, back to square one: you are "unpatriotic"
The Tories have weaponised this brilliantly. With the significant assistance of J Corbyn Esq. What a calamity he was
At some point it will become an issue, having an Opposition fundamentally crippled on the issue of "whether they actually like the country, or the people, they seek to govern" but for now it is hilarious
What they Labour need is a leader who seems happily at ease with Britishness, not just tolerant of it, or "respectful". Blair did that, superbly, by inventing Cool Britannia. He embodied it. He was a Brit, and he enioyed being British, but he did it in a new and interesting way
Starmer salutes the flag and looks stiff and earnest. It helps, but is is not enough, I fear - unless Boris and the Tories implode
Labour. Where is your Blair?
Starmer is on record as saying he wants the monarchy abolished. He’s posing with the flag because PR teams have told him to. The voters Labour have lost were lost because Starmer types offered their jobs to anyone from Eastern Europe who fancied bidding for it - they’re not going to be fooled by a rictus grin next to a Union Jack. He was kneeling to the BLM less than a year ago
Yes.
I fear in retrospect the BLM kneel will haunt him
However, I quite like Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer, at least he won't fuck the country like Corbyn. He is decent, and sensitive, and intelligent. A bit woke, but he doesn't actively support Hamas and the IRA, who want to kill British people for being British
For Labour, such is their plight, this constitutes progress: not having a leader who wants to kill average British voters
Early days, but a necessary step, one feels.
Next, post-Starmer, they need to find a new Blair. A Chuka Umunna character, perhaps. Just an idea. Someone cool and black and British and happy about it. Idris Elba as James Bond. I can see that working, for much of the party (and many voters)
A real shame for Labour that Chuka jumped ship. A horrendous move in hindsight for the party & for him political career-wise, though he may be happier now he’s out of it. He would have Labour much closer to the Tories now, in my opinion.
Nah, he was a massive fake. I've met him, total empty suit bullshitter.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
This time last year, my central heating had been off for a month.
Today, it’s snowing.
Failed to restart at Headingly because of snow. Glamorgan coach said it had never happened to him before. Might have saved Yorkshire's blushes, though.
LOL, been a while since I recall snow stopping play in a cricket match!
It actually happens fairly frequently at the northern grounds in the first month of the season.
Less common for it to (a) settle and hold up play for a long period and (b) get as far south as this in April.
I can remember snow in May in the Forest of Dean in the 1980s but that was definitely a one off. Can’t remember them even having significant snow in late March since then.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Which is?
Her doctor did not give her the ok to travel in time. Its a great pity as I would have enjoyed the idea of her temporarily stuck in a Premier Inn hotel for ten days With Harry. Seems an appropriate punishment for the dutchess.
Chuka Umunna was a real waste of someone who clearly had something to offer. He is, as is pointed out, charismatic and he also seemed a very capable performer. Something the Labour Party really struggle for these days. It’s a pity for politics he opted out.
Labours front bench is full of poor performers. The worst of which has to be Kate Green. When faced against the most inept education secretary in many many years she’s not made a dent. Her most memorable comments have been around changing the name of an OBE to remove empire from the name and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’. Both of which may be worthwhile long term aims but short term she needs to get stuck in.
I'll see your Kate Green. And raise you Anneliese Dodd.
The first female Labour politician to hold the post of either shadow or actual Chancellor. Green might be awful, but at least she won't have held back the cause of Labour having its first female leader.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
As for Green, it’s just embarrassing. She has occasionally made the right noises, but you have to go find them. If I were Shadow Education Secretary Gavin Williamson would right now be having suicidal thoughts because I would be pushing him so hard. The problem might simply be he’s making so many errors it’s difficult to know where to start.
She was one of the huge reservoir of talent labour had on its backbenches waiting to make a comeback when Corbyn left. Hardly any of them have made a mark. The one who has surprised me, and she is not leadership material, is Jess Phillips who has just got on with the job and made a few Appearances at the right time to talk about her brief and been pretty good. I’m not a great fan of hers but I think she’s maturing as a politician.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
My eye.. do you think she would be welcomed? She is not coming because of her disgraceful behaviour and doesn't want to face the music imho.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
And how do they feel now, covered head to toe in the taint of an 80-seat Boris majority?
Likely that the pro-EU side would've won the referendum, Faragian UKIP would've posed a significant threat to the Conservatives (and maybe Labour in the north of England), we may well have been lumbered with (or improved) the EU vaccine scheme.
Cameron gets succeeded by Osborne. We had a General Election last year, possible hung Parliament between blues, reds, and, fittingly, purples.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Now be fair John. I bow to nobody in my hatred for Johnson but for two very good reasons that is the right decision:
1) The reason he gave;
2) If he was there and Starmer wasn’t he would look as if he was exploiting the Duke’s death for political ends, which even though I’m sure he would have no objection to doing so, might backfire.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
Then why did she also come behind Burnham, given they had identical political views and he was much less experienced and indeed with due respect to his abilities, much less capable than she is?
PS, in this country politicians ‘stand,’ they do not ‘run.’ We are not Yanks.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Likely that the pro-EU side would've won the referendum, Faragian UKIP would've posed a significant threat to the Conservatives (and maybe Labour in the north of England), we may well have been lumbered with (or improved) the EU vaccine scheme.
Cameron gets succeeded by Osborne. We had a General Election last year, possible hung Parliament between blues, reds, and, fittingly, purples.
Maybe UKIP could claim that the vaccine programme screwup amounted to a signficant change of circumstances and argue for a second referendum?
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Fortunately it was not an isue with baby number 1 and an urgent flight for a baby shower.
Chuka Umunna was a real waste of someone who clearly had something to offer. He is, as is pointed out, charismatic and he also seemed a very capable performer. Something the Labour Party really struggle for these days. It’s a pity for politics he opted out.
Labours front bench is full of poor performers. The worst of which has to be Kate Green. When faced against the most inept education secretary in many many years she’s not made a dent. Her most memorable comments have been around changing the name of an OBE to remove empire from the name and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’. Both of which may be worthwhile long term aims but short term she needs to get stuck in.
I'll see your Kate Green. And raise you Anneliese Dodd.
The first female Labour politician to hold the post of either shadow or actual Chancellor. Green might be awful, but at least she won't have held back the cause of Labour having its first female leader.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
As for Green, it’s just embarrassing. She has occasionally made the right noises, but you have to go find them. If I were Shadow Education Secretary Gavin Williamson would right now be having suicidal thoughts because I would be pushing him so hard. The problem might simply be he’s making so many errors it’s difficult to know where to start.
She was one of the huge reservoir of talent labour had on its backbenches waiting to make a comeback when Corbyn left. Hardly any of them have made a mark. The one who has surprised me, and she is not leadership material, is Jess Phillips who has just got on with the job and made a few Appearances at the right time to talk about her brief and been pretty good. I’m not a great fan of hers but I think she’s maturing as a politician.
I come back to my point I made late last night about Starmer facing the electorate a second time in 2028/9 (having lost to Johnson in 2024): where is the obvious replacement?
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
I remember hearing (from Stephen Bush, who I trust as a political commentator) that no woman has ever beaten any man in a Labour Party leadership contest, i.e. the lowest placed man has always been above the highest placed woman.
To be fair the Tories’ first two female leaders were never put to the vote of the members.
He’s correct.
1994 - Beckett third behind Blair and Prescott 2010 - Abbott fifth behind Miliband, Miliband, Balls and Burnham 2015 - Cooper third, Kendall fourth behind Corbyn and Burnham 2020 - Starmer wins, ahead of Long Bailey and Nandy.
Your other point is true but slightly misleading. Until 1983 Labour didn’t elect its leaders among the membership, nor did the Tories until 2001. So Thatcher topping the ballot - twice - in 1975 is not a sign that she was somehow less worthy than others. It’s just a sign of a different set of priorities and systems. You can only win the competition you’re in, and she did.
And in 2016 - the first leadership election a woman had stood for the Tory leadership in since that time - the last two candidates were both female so a woman would have been elected even if Leadsom hadn’t withdrawn.
In 2019 of course no woman got past the first round, but Leadsom did get more votes than Harper.
Thanks for that: I thought he was right, but hadn’t checked it.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Being seen by many as un-patriotic is a pretty disastrous position for Labour to be in when you consider that working-class people are probably more likely to be serving in, are have served in, the armed forces. But that may not be true in the big cities and university towns, where most Labour activists are situated.
"Unpatriotic" is also a really hard thing to shake off. You can pose behind a billion flags but if one single MP says something daft and anti-British, back to square one: you are "unpatriotic"
The Tories have weaponised this brilliantly. With the significant assistance of J Corbyn Esq. What a calamity he was
At some point it will become an issue, having an Opposition fundamentally crippled on the issue of "whether they actually like the country, or the people, they seek to govern" but for now it is hilarious
What they Labour need is a leader who seems happily at ease with Britishness, not just tolerant of it, or "respectful". Blair did that, superbly, by inventing Cool Britannia. He embodied it. He was a Brit, and he enioyed being British, but he did it in a new and interesting way
Starmer salutes the flag and looks stiff and earnest. It helps, but is is not enough, I fear - unless Boris and the Tories implode
Labour. Where is your Blair?
Starmer is on record as saying he wants the monarchy abolished. He’s posing with the flag because PR teams have told him to. The voters Labour have lost were lost because Starmer types offered their jobs to anyone from Eastern Europe who fancied bidding for it - they’re not going to be fooled by a rictus grin next to a Union Jack. He was kneeling to the BLM less than a year ago
Yes.
I fear in retrospect the BLM kneel will haunt him
However, I quite like Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer, at least he won't fuck the country like Corbyn. He is decent, and sensitive, and intelligent. A bit woke, but he doesn't actively support Hamas and the IRA, who want to kill British people for being British
For Labour, such is their plight, this constitutes progress: not having a leader who wants to kill average British voters
Early days, but a necessary step, one feels.
Next, post-Starmer, they need to find a new Blair. A Chuka Umunna character, perhaps. Just an idea. Someone cool and black and British and happy about it. Idris Elba as James Bond. I can see that working, for much of the party (and many voters)
A real shame for Labour that Chuka jumped ship. A horrendous move in hindsight for the party & for him political career-wise, though he may be happier now he’s out of it. He would have Labour much closer to the Tories now, in my opinion.
Nah, he was a massive fake. I've met him, total empty suit bullshitter.
Blair pulled that off for a decade though.
Yeh, that's right, Blair was an empty suit who thought about nothing:
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
To be fair, she did get a lot of stick about that.
Using a private jet? Oh, that carbon footprint.....
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Tragic - everyone must feel for her at such a difficult time...for her...
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Nah.. she isn't coming because of her appalling behaviour and in the full knowledge that she would be as welcome as hungry piranhas in a swimming pool.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Tragic - everyone must feel for her at such a difficult time...for her...
The only people making it about her are the people in here moaning that either she’s not coming or wouldn’t be welcome even if she did .
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
Jess Phillips was dreadful in 2019 however I get the sense it was too early for her. She needs to gain some experience which she is now getting. She’s potentially one for the future.
I stand by the fact Starmer was clearly the best candidate standing in 2019 and Labour could have done a lot, lot worse.
Right now he needs to continue quietly reforming the party and getting the nutters out. Some polling was missed the other day but Jewish voters rate his performance so far, so there is some evidence he is making strides on that front.
Now after all this, there’s a good chance he loses in 2024. I’m not making firm predictions either way and I am stunned others are bearing in mind how much egg people have got on their faces in the past but each to their own.
If the biggest achievement Starmer makes is bringing some respect and honour back to Labour and putting it into a position where a leader can come through to win then that’s good enough for me frankly.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
Then why did she also come behind Burnham, given they had identical political views and he was much less experienced and indeed with due respect to his abilities, much less capable than she is?
PS, in this country politicians ‘stand,’ they do not ‘run.’ We are not Yanks.
Burnham is a better communicator, as he has demonstrated in his Mayoral role.
There are misogynists in all parties, racists too. Simply put: there is an arsehole element in every population, whether doctors, teachers, police or politicians. It is intrinsic to the human condition.
I think Rayner would have beaten Starmer if she had got the better end of the Granita pact with her housemate RLB.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
It was done to the fact that she was crap I am afraid. Never done anything of note and just an empty suit, much more useless than Starmer and he is crap.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
Yes. It was in theory a good idea, to have one property survey completed by the seller and available to any prospective purchasers. The problem was that the proposed HIPS were not detailed enough, didn’t address liability issues, didn’t use qualified surveyors - with their professional indemnity insurance - and therefore weren’t acceptable to mortgage providers.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
It was done to the fact that she was crap I am afraid. Never done anything of note and just an empty suit, much more useless than Starmer and he is crap.
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Tragic - everyone must feel for her at such a difficult time...for her...
The only people making it about her are the people in here moaning that either she’s not coming or wouldn’t be welcome even if she did .
Was a certainty she could not come, would have been too embarrassing, bad enough for Harry given he is now lower than Andy in pecking order.
Chuka Umunna was a real waste of someone who clearly had something to offer. He is, as is pointed out, charismatic and he also seemed a very capable performer. Something the Labour Party really struggle for these days. It’s a pity for politics he opted out.
Labours front bench is full of poor performers. The worst of which has to be Kate Green. When faced against the most inept education secretary in many many years she’s not made a dent. Her most memorable comments have been around changing the name of an OBE to remove empire from the name and ‘decolonialising the curriculum’. Both of which may be worthwhile long term aims but short term she needs to get stuck in.
I'll see your Kate Green. And raise you Anneliese Dodd.
The first female Labour politician to hold the post of either shadow or actual Chancellor. Green might be awful, but at least she won't have held back the cause of Labour having its first female leader.
I had high hopes of Dodds too but she is missing in action. She’s really really bright and the shadow chancellor role should be a breeze for her but she’s just totally ineffective, it just shows being smart is not enough.
It’s hard to see who they’d put in there to be honest. Reeves ? I can’t say I find her a warm person but she may do a good job. It was said the Corbyn shadow cabinet was ineffective and replace him and the talent would come flooding back. It is yet to be seen.
A friend of mine was one of her tutors at Edinburgh and speaks very highly of her intelligence and analytical ability but she has not made any breakthrough at all. Its been tough in the lockdown for anyone other than the leaders of the opposition to get heard but would the Sunday morning shows turn down the Shadow Chancellor? I don't think so.
She did highlight the lack of support for the self employed in the early days. Other than that I am struggling to remember a position that differs materially from the government.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
Jess Phillips was dreadful in 2019 however I get the sense it was too early for her. She needs to gain some experience which she is now getting. She’s potentially one for the future.
I stand by the fact Starmer was clearly the best candidate standing in 2019 and Labour could have done a lot, lot worse.
Right now he needs to continue quietly reforming the party and getting the nutters out. Some polling was missed the other day but Jewish voters rate his performance so far, so there is some evidence he is making strides on that front.
Now after all this, there’s a good chance he loses in 2024. I’m not making firm predictions either way and I am stunned others are bearing in mind how much egg people have got on their faces in the past but each to their own.
If the biggest achievement Starmer makes is bringing some respect and honour back to Labour and putting it into a position where a leader can come through to win then that’s good enough for me frankly.
If Starmer is the best youve got you really are in the shit
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
Tragic - everyone must feel for her at such a difficult time...for her...
The only people making it about her are the people in here moaning that either she’s not coming or wouldn’t be welcome even if she did .
Was a certainty she could not come, would have been too embarrassing, bad enough for Harry given he is now lower than Andy in pecking order.
They'll be herded together at the back of the chapel, in the black sheep pen.....
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
It was done to the fact that she was crap I am afraid. Never done anything of note and just an empty suit, much more useless than Starmer and he is crap.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
Yes. It was in theory a good idea, to have one property survey completed by the seller and available to any prospective purchasers. The problem was that the proposed HIPS were not detailed enough, didn’t address liability issues, didn’t use qualified surveyors - with their professional indemnity insurance - and therefore weren’t acceptable to mortgage providers.
I thought it was something like that. My own experience of house buying is limited to the house I’m in now, bought when John Major was PM, so I was not personally affected.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
Yes. It was in theory a good idea, to have one property survey completed by the seller and available to any prospective purchasers. The problem was that the proposed HIPS were not detailed enough, didn’t address liability issues, didn’t use qualified surveyors - with their professional indemnity insurance - and therefore weren’t acceptable to mortgage providers.
We still have the crappy Scottish version in place , you fork out £600+ or suchlike for a report that lasts some months and then have to pay again, it is full of similar crap.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
There wasn't a covid epidemic then.
Are there any other reasons why a pregnant woman shouldn’t fly?
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Cooper’s *ostensible* problem was her politics.
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
No, it really was her politics.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
It was done to the fact that she was crap I am afraid. Never done anything of note and just an empty suit, much more useless than Starmer and he is crap.
Are there any politicians you do rate?
Alex Salmond...
spot on , top UK politician in my lifetime. I also liked ken Clarke.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
Yes. It was in theory a good idea, to have one property survey completed by the seller and available to any prospective purchasers. The problem was that the proposed HIPS were not detailed enough, didn’t address liability issues, didn’t use qualified surveyors - with their professional indemnity insurance - and therefore weren’t acceptable to mortgage providers.
We still have the crappy Scottish version in place , you fork out £600+ or suchlike for a report that lasts some months and then have to pay again, it is full of similar crap.
It's certainly made life harder for distress sellers although some surveyors will now extend credit until the sale goes through. They are the worst kind of tick box though with very little useful information and a lot of nonsense such as the energy efficiency of the house.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
What’s the liability issue if they miss something completely, presumably the HIPS providers have to carry PI insurance?
IIRC the conveyancing process is quite different between England and Scotland.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Now be fair John. I bow to nobody in my hatred for Johnson but for two very good reasons that is the right decision:
1) The reason he gave;
2) If he was there and Starmer wasn’t he would look as if he was exploiting the Duke’s death for political ends, which even though I’m sure he would have no objection to doing so, might backfire.
That may be so, whatever the state of relations between Number 10 and the Palace, but think of the fun CCHQ would have had in an alternative universe where Corbyn declined the invitation.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
Were they introduced before or after HIPS? I remember hearing that in Scottish law “gazumping” (sp?) is not allowed, so I’m assuming that the whole process is different in many ways.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
There wasn't a covid epidemic then.
Are there any other reasons why a pregnant woman shouldn’t fly?
In part it might be her history of miscarriage last pregnancy. Also not recommended after 28 weeks, indeed specifically rulled out by most airlines.
ICYMI Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First that a software upgrade made during a Covid shutdown of aviation was not adequately tested. Second, that the different meaning of "Miss" between cultures forms some sort of argument in the university English debate mentioned earlier. Third, see first.
Read that report last week.
A serious failure to test the software, followed by failures of the crew to sense-check the outputs. It’s hardly as if they’ve been running to 20-minute turnarounds for the past few months, is it?
Overweight is still overweight though, even though there’s plenty of margins built in to the design. Thankfully the more important load balance wasn’t screwed up.
I've been surprised over the last few years how few people are naturally inquisitive enough to test things properly without being forced to.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
There wasn't a covid epidemic then.
Are there any other reasons why a pregnant woman shouldn’t fly?
In part it might be her history of miscarriage last pregnancy. Also not recommended after 28 weeks, indeed specifically rulled out by most airlines.
Not on a private jet.. she loves that mode of travel
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
To be fair to Andrew, AIUI, he's accused of having it away with a 17 year old girl, which would be legal, if morally reprehensible, in this country. Unless, of course, she could prove it was rape. There's little question, though, again AIUI, that she was deceived into participating.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
Were they introduced before or after HIPS? I remember hearing that in Scottish law “gazumping” (sp?) is not allowed, so I’m assuming that the whole process is different in many ways.
Almost exactly the same time but since we have perpetual SNP governments these days there has been no opportunity for different thoughts.
When I started as a lawyer the contract by buy or sell a house was concluded quite swiftly making it binding on both parties with clear rights of damages if the contract was not fulfilled. It was an excellent system putting the risk of inability to perform on the party unable to perform. Sadly since then the practice has developed of leaving the contract open until the last minute which puts us in much the same position as England and means nearly all the risk is being borne by the seller.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
What’s the liability issue if they miss something completely, presumably the HIPS providers have to carry PI insurance?
IIRC the conveyancing process is quite different between England and Scotland.
Yes they have professional indemnity insurance and the purchaser's loss falls within the test of reasonable foreseeability so there is a remedy, at least in theory. In practice it is more difficult because as you pointed out there is not nearly enough information and the questions are standardised rather than relating to the property in question.
ICYMI Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First that a software upgrade made during a Covid shutdown of aviation was not adequately tested. Second, that the different meaning of "Miss" between cultures forms some sort of argument in the university English debate mentioned earlier. Third, see first.
Read that report last week.
A serious failure to test the software, followed by failures of the crew to sense-check the outputs. It’s hardly as if they’ve been running to 20-minute turnarounds for the past few months, is it?
Overweight is still overweight though, even though there’s plenty of margins built in to the design. Thankfully the more important load balance wasn’t screwed up.
I've been surprised over the last few years how few people are naturally inquisitive enough to test things properly without being forced to.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
Anyone who has ever marked work that involved using a calculator at some point will be used to that. Indeed anyone who has ever used a calculator should be aware of the problem, even if many people assume that it is infallible.
There is an example of this that sometimes does the rounds with a calculation of the form
6+4/2
which is 8, but an unwary user of a calculator can get 5 if they don’t know what they are doing. It’s also a good illustration of why brackets make life clearer than relying on everyone using the same order of operations.
ICYMI Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First that a software upgrade made during a Covid shutdown of aviation was not adequately tested. Second, that the different meaning of "Miss" between cultures forms some sort of argument in the university English debate mentioned earlier. Third, see first.
Read that report last week.
A serious failure to test the software, followed by failures of the crew to sense-check the outputs. It’s hardly as if they’ve been running to 20-minute turnarounds for the past few months, is it?
Overweight is still overweight though, even though there’s plenty of margins built in to the design. Thankfully the more important load balance wasn’t screwed up.
I've been surprised over the last few years how few people are naturally inquisitive enough to test things properly without being forced to.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
I used to be the guy who ran through the QA scripts checking outputs, then started doing random things to see what came out the other end.
There’s several things that stand out from this one:
1. That the airline booking system can feed nonsense into the dispatch system, that ends up on the actual plane. 2. That someone deliberately coded the title ‘Miss’ to be interpreted as being a child, because it was normal in the country where the software was developed. Where was this, and who signed off that gender-specific specification? The booking system also contains dates of birth, which are obviously a better indicator. 3. The dispatcher (a qualified professional, even if now office-based rather than at the gate) didn’t spot the unusual number of ‘children’ on the flights. 4. The pilots also didn’t enquire with the cabin crew about the large number of children on board.
Thankfully it didn’t make much of a difference this time, but it was rightly classed as a serious incident. If the plane had been carrying, for example, a women’s football team, the error could have been significant enough to affect V speeds and fuel burn. (Although someone might have done a better job at spotting a much bigger error).
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
Cooper's problem was not her gender, but her politics, as was Kendall's. Much as I liked them personally and their politics, that was not what their party wanted. The party wanted a clear break from New Labour, of which Ed Miliband was the repeat as farce.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
The only thing Cooper ever did was to force HIPS upon us.. a fatuous piece of unnecessary legislation. The only reason she was discussed on here was because Mr Smithson bigged her up. She has no gravitas and whines a lot.
Her ministerial record speaks for itself.
HIPS don’t lie.
HIPS seemed like something out of The Thick of It: a piece of legislation which was proposed to show that the department was Doing Something rather than to address a particular need. If I remember correctly it was supposed to replace the survey done by the prospective buyers, but as the mortgage providers didn’t trust them it just made the whole process more expensive.
In Scotland we still have them! And they are accepted by the lenders, mainly, although they will want any reservations more thoroughly investigated.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
What’s the liability issue if they miss something completely, presumably the HIPS providers have to carry PI insurance?
IIRC the conveyancing process is quite different between England and Scotland.
Just full of bullshit about energy efficiency as David says and a surveyors valuation by wandering around for 10 minutes.
These kind of articles make me despair for the future. Endless goalpost shifting. I realise it's not government policy (at present), but it's clearly a sufficiently widely held strand of thought that this sort of thing keeps popping up in the papers.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
Travel in pregnancy is a problem, doubly so in times of covid, as a significant risk factor.
Except that she famously travelled from the UK to the US for a party, at about seven months gone last time.
There wasn't a covid epidemic then.
Are there any other reasons why a pregnant woman shouldn’t fly?
In part it might be her history of miscarriage last pregnancy. Also not recommended after 28 weeks, indeed specifically rulled out by most airlines.
Which is why she took a private plane last time! Does anyone believe she actually had a miscarriage?
ICYMI Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First that a software upgrade made during a Covid shutdown of aviation was not adequately tested. Second, that the different meaning of "Miss" between cultures forms some sort of argument in the university English debate mentioned earlier. Third, see first.
Read that report last week.
A serious failure to test the software, followed by failures of the crew to sense-check the outputs. It’s hardly as if they’ve been running to 20-minute turnarounds for the past few months, is it?
Overweight is still overweight though, even though there’s plenty of margins built in to the design. Thankfully the more important load balance wasn’t screwed up.
I've been surprised over the last few years how few people are naturally inquisitive enough to test things properly without being forced to.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
Anyone who has ever marked work that involved using a calculator at some point will be used to that. Indeed anyone who has ever used a calculator should be aware of the problem, even if many people assume that it is infallible.
There is an example of this that sometimes does the rounds with a calculation of the form
6+4/2
which is 8, but an unwary user of a calculator can get 5 if they don’t know what they are doing. It’s also a good illustration of why brackets make life clearer than relying on everyone using the same order of operations.
I had problems with integration and differentiation. I could do it without understanding in the least why It had to be done . Calculus and log to the base e produced a brain fog.
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
Some might feel that, as a self appointed moral arbiter, you fall a little short of the ideal.
Late night question for the PB brains trust (I may repeat tomorrow to get more responses).
I have been following the 'Statement of Persons Nominated' around my area (Bootle). Someone I know, is clearly not very good with these things, has managed to foul up the application.
They are standing in a rock solid safe Labour ward, as NOT a Labour candidate (so the chances of winning are pretty much nil). They have entered their name, as the person standing as 'Jimmy Bloggs', and then, clearly not understanding the form, have entered the name of the person who nominated them as 'James A Bloggs'. Ie, they've nominated themselves.
Now I know administration foul ups are ten a penny, so its somehow been allowed to stand. They're not going to win. Labour will get 101% of the vote. However, should the impossible happen, and they do win; am I right in thinking the first thing that will happen is Labour candidate will make a complaint and the result overturned and they'll have lost anyway?
I’m by no means an expert on electoral law (thank God!) but I’d be surprised if that was deemed a proportionate response by the courts. They may have no discretion though if it was an invalid nomination - my argument would be though, that if the RO has accepted it as valid then it is good enough
Being seen by many as un-patriotic is a pretty disastrous position for Labour to be in when you consider that working-class people are probably more likely to be serving in, are have served in, the armed forces. But that may not be true in the big cities and university towns, where most Labour activists are situated.
"Unpatriotic" is also a really hard thing to shake off. You can pose behind a billion flags but if one single MP says something daft and anti-British, back to square one: you are "unpatriotic"
The Tories have weaponised this brilliantly. With the significant assistance of J Corbyn Esq. What a calamity he was
At some point it will become an issue, having an Opposition fundamentally crippled on the issue of "whether they actually like the country, or the people, they seek to govern" but for now it is hilarious
What they Labour need is a leader who seems happily at ease with Britishness, not just tolerant of it, or "respectful". Blair did that, superbly, by inventing Cool Britannia. He embodied it. He was a Brit, and he enioyed being British, but he did it in a new and interesting way
Starmer salutes the flag and looks stiff and earnest. It helps, but is is not enough, I fear - unless Boris and the Tories implode
Labour. Where is your Blair?
Starmer is on record as saying he wants the monarchy abolished. He’s posing with the flag because PR teams have told him to. The voters Labour have lost were lost because Starmer types offered their jobs to anyone from Eastern Europe who fancied bidding for it - they’re not going to be fooled by a rictus grin next to a Union Jack. He was kneeling to the BLM less than a year ago
Yes.
I fear in retrospect the BLM kneel will haunt him
However, I quite like Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer, at least he won't fuck the country like Corbyn. He is decent, and sensitive, and intelligent. A bit woke, but he doesn't actively support Hamas and the IRA, who want to kill British people for being British
For Labour, such is their plight, this constitutes progress: not having a leader who wants to kill average British voters
Early days, but a necessary step, one feels.
Next, post-Starmer, they need to find a new Blair. A Chuka Umunna character, perhaps. Just an idea. Someone cool and black and British and happy about it. Idris Elba as James Bond. I can see that working, for much of the party (and many voters)
A real shame for Labour that Chuka jumped ship. A horrendous move in hindsight for the party & for him political career-wise, though he may be happier now he’s out of it. He would have Labour much closer to the Tories now, in my opinion.
He was terrible though. I find Starmer dull and uninspiring but he is clearly intelligent and competent. Chukka was just flaky
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
Some might feel that, as a self appointed moral arbiter, you fall a little short of the ideal.
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
Some might feel that, as a self appointed moral arbiter, you fall a little short of the ideal.
The story of my life.. falling short of other PBers high standards. Pray do explain why calling her out for her and her husband's appalling behaviour has vexed you?
Given the advanced stage of Megan Markles pregnancy and the current covid situation traveling to the funeral wouldn’t be a wise thing to do but clearly the hate mob have decided to criticize her . And then if she did come they would say her presence would upstage the funeral . So she can’t win either way.
I’m curious as to what the reaction will be to Prince Andrew attending. On the one hand he is definitely persona non grata now, but on the other it is his father’s funeral, the sort of thing that convicted prisoners are let out on license to attend.
A few yanks might whine about it but as far as I know he hasn't been nor is likely to be convicted of anything. He has been very foolish but that's a long way from insinuating guilt.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
Some might feel that, as a self appointed moral arbiter, you fall a little short of the ideal.
It's a private funeral..
There is no problem with Prince Andrew, who has nothing whatsoever proved against him.
And, who when stuff was put to a Court several years ago it was hoicked out by the Judge like a piece of rancid fish.
Late night question for the PB brains trust (I may repeat tomorrow to get more responses).
I have been following the 'Statement of Persons Nominated' around my area (Bootle). Someone I know, is clearly not very good with these things, has managed to foul up the application.
They are standing in a rock solid safe Labour ward, as NOT a Labour candidate (so the chances of winning are pretty much nil). They have entered their name, as the person standing as 'Jimmy Bloggs', and then, clearly not understanding the form, have entered the name of the person who nominated them as 'James A Bloggs'. Ie, they've nominated themselves.
Now I know administration foul ups are ten a penny, so its somehow been allowed to stand. They're not going to win. Labour will get 101% of the vote. However, should the impossible happen, and they do win; am I right in thinking the first thing that will happen is Labour candidate will make a complaint and the result overturned and they'll have lost anyway?
I’m by no means an expert on electoral law (thank God!) but I’d be surprised if that was deemed a proportionate response by the courts. They may have no discretion though if it was an invalid nomination - my argument would be though, that if the RO has accepted it as valid then it is good enough
Subsequent discussion in the thread appears already to have established that it is legitimate
ICYMI Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children
A programming error in the software used by UK airline TUI to check-in passengers led to miscalculated flight loads on three flights last July, a potentially serious safety issue.
The error occurred, according to a report [PDF] released on Thursday by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), because the check-in software treated travelers identified as "Miss" in the passenger list as children, and assigned them a weight of 35 kg (~77 lbs) instead of 69 kg (~152 lbs) for an adult.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First that a software upgrade made during a Covid shutdown of aviation was not adequately tested. Second, that the different meaning of "Miss" between cultures forms some sort of argument in the university English debate mentioned earlier. Third, see first.
Read that report last week.
A serious failure to test the software, followed by failures of the crew to sense-check the outputs. It’s hardly as if they’ve been running to 20-minute turnarounds for the past few months, is it?
Overweight is still overweight though, even though there’s plenty of margins built in to the design. Thankfully the more important load balance wasn’t screwed up.
I've been surprised over the last few years how few people are naturally inquisitive enough to test things properly without being forced to.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
Anyone who has ever marked work that involved using a calculator at some point will be used to that. Indeed anyone who has ever used a calculator should be aware of the problem, even if many people assume that it is infallible.
There is an example of this that sometimes does the rounds with a calculation of the form
6+4/2
which is 8, but an unwary user of a calculator can get 5 if they don’t know what they are doing. It’s also a good illustration of why brackets make life clearer than relying on everyone using the same order of operations.
I had problems with integration and differentiation. I could do it without understanding in the least why It had to be done . Calculus and log to the base e produced a brain fog.
Natural logs (and the inverse, e to the power x) are crucially important in Physics for anything either to do with exponential decay (or growth, though that is much less common in physics than biology) or for properly analysing waves. For the latter you need i as well, the square root of -1; in electrical engineering I think they use j rather than i so it doesn’t get confused with current.
Being seen by many as un-patriotic is a pretty disastrous position for Labour to be in when you consider that working-class people are probably more likely to be serving in, are have served in, the armed forces. But that may not be true in the big cities and university towns, where most Labour activists are situated.
"Unpatriotic" is also a really hard thing to shake off. You can pose behind a billion flags but if one single MP says something daft and anti-British, back to square one: you are "unpatriotic"
The Tories have weaponised this brilliantly. With the significant assistance of J Corbyn Esq. What a calamity he was
At some point it will become an issue, having an Opposition fundamentally crippled on the issue of "whether they actually like the country, or the people, they seek to govern" but for now it is hilarious
What they Labour need is a leader who seems happily at ease with Britishness, not just tolerant of it, or "respectful". Blair did that, superbly, by inventing Cool Britannia. He embodied it. He was a Brit, and he enioyed being British, but he did it in a new and interesting way
Starmer salutes the flag and looks stiff and earnest. It helps, but is is not enough, I fear - unless Boris and the Tories implode
Labour. Where is your Blair?
Starmer is on record as saying he wants the monarchy abolished. He’s posing with the flag because PR teams have told him to. The voters Labour have lost were lost because Starmer types offered their jobs to anyone from Eastern Europe who fancied bidding for it - they’re not going to be fooled by a rictus grin next to a Union Jack. He was kneeling to the BLM less than a year ago
Yes.
I fear in retrospect the BLM kneel will haunt him
However, I quite like Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer, at least he won't fuck the country like Corbyn. He is decent, and sensitive, and intelligent. A bit woke, but he doesn't actively support Hamas and the IRA, who want to kill British people for being British
For Labour, such is their plight, this constitutes progress: not having a leader who wants to kill average British voters
Early days, but a necessary step, one feels.
Next, post-Starmer, they need to find a new Blair. A Chuka Umunna character, perhaps. Just an idea. Someone cool and black and British and happy about it. Idris Elba as James Bond. I can see that working, for much of the party (and many voters)
A real shame for Labour that Chuka jumped ship. A horrendous move in hindsight for the party & for him political career-wise, though he may be happier now he’s out of it. He would have Labour much closer to the Tories now, in my opinion.
He was terrible though. I find Starmer dull and uninspiring but he is clearly intelligent and competent. Chukka was just flaky
Intelligence and competence is good enough for me. I'll provide my own stimuli.
There is a growing appreciation among politicians that the inoculation programme is not a cure-all. While efficacious for most, vaccination does not guarantee protection for everyone and about half the country still hasn’t had a shot. “Monday’s reopening should be OK,” says one person at the heart of decision-making, before adding the critical caveat “but a lot depends on human behaviour.” There’s the potential for infection rates to take off again if a lot of the public take it as a cue to dramatically reduce compliance with social distancing.
Scientists aren’t certain when a new surge will happen, but there is a consensus that there will be one.
Then there’s the spectre that causes the iciest shivers down the spine of Whitehall: encountering a mutation that is vaccine-evasive. “That would take us back to square one,” groans one senior Tory. Actually, it probably wouldn’t be quite that awful, because vaccines can be adapted to respond, but it would certainly be a massively demoralising setback.
The scientific advice to unlock with caution has been the dominant influence on Mr Johnson since the new year, when he was finally forced to learn from his previous blunders. Fear of the response from Tory MPs was a significant factor in some of his gravest mistakes, imposing lockdowns too slowly and trying to get out of them with dangerous haste. The noise they generate has waxed and waned in inverse correlation with the death toll. When fatalities are rising, they go mute. Not much was heard from the let-it-rippers in January when the virus had been allowed to explode out of control because Mr Johnson followed their urgings by spurning the scientific advice to have a pre-emptive autumn lockdown. When death rates are falling, often thanks to the very measures that they fume about, they turn up the volume again.
When he first set out his “roadmap”, Mr Johnson declared that Britain’s emergence from this lockdown would be “cautious but irreversible”. He was not in a position to make such a promise, but he stands a better chance of keeping it if he listens to the scientists and shuts his ears to the siren voices in the Tory party and the rightwing media who have lured him on to the rocks before.
Being seen by many as un-patriotic is a pretty disastrous position for Labour to be in when you consider that working-class people are probably more likely to be serving in, are have served in, the armed forces. But that may not be true in the big cities and university towns, where most Labour activists are situated.
"Unpatriotic" is also a really hard thing to shake off. You can pose behind a billion flags but if one single MP says something daft and anti-British, back to square one: you are "unpatriotic"
The Tories have weaponised this brilliantly. With the significant assistance of J Corbyn Esq. What a calamity he was
At some point it will become an issue, having an Opposition fundamentally crippled on the issue of "whether they actually like the country, or the people, they seek to govern" but for now it is hilarious
What they Labour need is a leader who seems happily at ease with Britishness, not just tolerant of it, or "respectful". Blair did that, superbly, by inventing Cool Britannia. He embodied it. He was a Brit, and he enioyed being British, but he did it in a new and interesting way
Starmer salutes the flag and looks stiff and earnest. It helps, but is is not enough, I fear - unless Boris and the Tories implode
Labour. Where is your Blair?
Starmer is on record as saying he wants the monarchy abolished. He’s posing with the flag because PR teams have told him to. The voters Labour have lost were lost because Starmer types offered their jobs to anyone from Eastern Europe who fancied bidding for it - they’re not going to be fooled by a rictus grin next to a Union Jack. He was kneeling to the BLM less than a year ago
Yes.
I fear in retrospect the BLM kneel will haunt him
However, I quite like Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer, at least he won't fuck the country like Corbyn. He is decent, and sensitive, and intelligent. A bit woke, but he doesn't actively support Hamas and the IRA, who want to kill British people for being British
For Labour, such is their plight, this constitutes progress: not having a leader who wants to kill average British voters
Early days, but a necessary step, one feels.
Next, post-Starmer, they need to find a new Blair. A Chuka Umunna character, perhaps. Just an idea. Someone cool and black and British and happy about it. Idris Elba as James Bond. I can see that working, for much of the party (and many voters)
A real shame for Labour that Chuka jumped ship. A horrendous move in hindsight for the party & for him political career-wise, though he may be happier now he’s out of it. He would have Labour much closer to the Tories now, in my opinion.
He was terrible though. I find Starmer dull and uninspiring but he is clearly intelligent and competent. Chukka was just flaky
Intelligence and competence is good enough for me. I'll provide my own stimuli.
Yes, many of the problems of the modern age stem from our greater desire for entertainment than competence, and style over outcome.
Good to see a minor outbreak of sanity in France. There'll be an uncomfortable calculation to be done since the Health Authorities told them to do it from January. Could have had another 3m with one dose.
PARIS (Reuters) - France will lengthen the period between the first and second shots of mRNA anti-COVID vaccines to six weeks from four weeks as of April 14 to accelerate the inoculation campaign, Health Minister Olivier Veran told the JDD newspaper on Sunday.
Although France’s top health authority advised a six-week period between the two shots in January in order to stretch supplies, the government at the time said there was insufficient data on how well the vaccines performed with a longer interval.
Macron claimed the AZ vaccine was quasi-ineffective for people over 65. Very, very loudly. France’s top health authority was always going to get drowned out. And on delaying second doses, reluctant to get fired by pointing out that as with vaccines, on refusing to adopt "l'attitde rosbif" he was again being a twat.
I had dinner last night with some French contacts of mine
They thought that Xavier Bertrand was in with a good shot. Admittedly I was teasing them about the prospect of a Melenchon - Le Pen run off in round 2 (“Alien vs Predator”)
The remarkable story of the woman who was pretty well responsible for the development of mRNA as a therapeutic, and without whom the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would not have existed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html ... For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.
But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year....
These kind of articles make me despair for the future. Endless goalpost shifting. I realise it's not government policy (at present), but it's clearly a sufficiently widely held strand of thought that this sort of thing keeps popping up in the papers.
At least this one has some numbers in it - suggesting that just under 100 cases per week per 100k people is worryingly high.
Which it is.
Monitoring is obvs necessary, and trigger levels need to be such that action can be taken before it gets out of control, and the dynamics are understood wrt to a vaccinated population.
I have no problem with that, as long as we keep the number of hotspots low and the methodology appropriate.
There's also quite a bit of wibble in it of course, but it's the Observer on a Sunday.
Surely the first woman ever to hold either of those roles? Or is there some Tory that I’ve missed?
No, but I was looking at it through the lens of Labour's inability to have a female leader - 46 years and counting behind the supposed misogynistic Tories. Dodd will give Labour's knuckle-draggers extra ammunition, when it comes to replacing Starmer.
It’s not about ammunition, because nobody overtly campaigns against a woman being leader of the Labour Party. It’s just that they always find an excuse, however flimsy, as to why that particular woman isn’t the right person at that moment.
In 2010 and 2020 it was easy because the lone/leading female candidate clearly was not up to being leader. But in 2016 they decided Cooper was ‘uninspiring’ and elected Corbyn instead. Now, if you want a clearer and more absurd example of sexism I’m struggling to find it, but nobody stood up and actually said ‘we don’t want her as leader because she has a vagina.’
In a way, such covert sexism is more insidious than that would have been. But it does mean there’s no reason to think Dodds’ performance will make a difference to it.
TBF Cooper is boring, unimpressive, not up to it and didn’t really want the job. I can understand why they went for the charismatic grandpa offering easy solutions.
Genuinely, I really really don’t understand why Cooper is so highly rated. She was useless as a Cabinet minister. Can anyone point out 3 original thoughts or good decisions she has made?
Good to see a minor outbreak of sanity in France. There'll be an uncomfortable calculation to be done since the Health Authorities told them to do it from January. Could have had another 3m with one dose.
PARIS (Reuters) - France will lengthen the period between the first and second shots of mRNA anti-COVID vaccines to six weeks from four weeks as of April 14 to accelerate the inoculation campaign, Health Minister Olivier Veran told the JDD newspaper on Sunday.
Although France’s top health authority advised a six-week period between the two shots in January in order to stretch supplies, the government at the time said there was insufficient data on how well the vaccines performed with a longer interval.
Macron claimed the AZ vaccine was quasi-ineffective for people over 65. Very, very loudly. France’s top health authority was always going to get drowned out. And on delaying second doses, reluctant to get fired by pointing out that as with vaccines, on refusing to adopt "l'attitde rosbif" he was again being a twat.
I had dinner last night with some French contacts of mine
They thought that Xavier Bertrand was in with a good shot. Admittedly I was teasing them about the prospect of a Melenchon - Le Pen run off in round 2 (“Alien vs Predator”)
Interesting. "his best shot probably relies on the president stumbling badly" - how many extra deaths laid at Macron's door does it take to constitute a bad stumble?
The remarkable story of the woman who was pretty well responsible for the development of mRNA as a therapeutic, and without whom the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would not have existed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html ... For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.
But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year....
The Nobel Prize judges are going to have one hell of a time of it this year!
Thank whoever you pray to, for all these scientists doing good work, often for many years and for little reward or recognition.
As a participant in the 2015 Labour leadership election, I'd like to respond to some of the myths earlier in this thread.
Cooper didn't lose because she was female, just as Burnham didn't lost because he was male. Corbyn won because Cooper and Burnham both ran absolutely dreadful campaigns that did nothing to appeal to those in the party who wanted change. They made no attempt at all to tickle the sweet spot of the soft left, let alone the hard left. They came across as continuity Cameron/Osborne, offering no way out of austerity. They had to offer at least some red meat to the party; they didn't. I intended to vote for Cooper from the outset, but after the campaign only did so with a very heavy heart. They let Corbyn win.
The remarkable story of the woman who was pretty well responsible for the development of mRNA as a therapeutic, and without whom the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would not have existed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html ... For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.
But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year....
The Nobel Prize judges are going to have one hell of a time of it this year!
Thank whoever you pray to, for all these scientists doing good work, often for many years and for little reward or recognition.
It's one of the few non-ridiculous benefits of the honours system, for the British and Commonwealth scientists at least - it isn't much, but it will be easier to at least formally recognise large numbers of them.
Don't you just love the excuse as to why Megan is not coming to the funeral.
Meghan is not coming because she is pregnant and on medical advice. Perhaps you feel she should have used the Prime Minister's excuse. Boris is not going because he wants to make room for the family and anyway he's not Jeremy Corbyn so it doesn't matter.
That’s harsh on both of them.
Meghan doesn’t want to go and has doctors advice (which will be genuine if she is 3rd trimester - although the risk is about the chance the baby may be born early vs any health issue & so isn’t really a risk in her case as she’d get great care regardless).
Boris - where numbers are limited it’s right he steps back. HMQ, C&C, W&K, H, A&T, Peter, Zara & Mike Tindall, A, B&E+2, E&S+2. You are already at 20 before you have included great grandkids (3 for W&K) plus 2-3 priests.
Comments
To quote an old joke, best not repeated nowadays.
And I'm not Labour; just generally anti-Tory.
It’s hard to see who they’d put in there to be honest. Reeves ? I can’t say I find her a warm person but she may do a good job. It was said the Corbyn shadow cabinet was ineffective and replace him and the talent would come flooding back. It is yet to be seen.
Corbyn was a relic of the old left, of a mythical time of purity before Blair contaminated everything. This is why he motivated the young, and swept up older activists who finally felt free of the taint of Blairism.
Less common for it to (a) settle and hold up play for a long period and (b) get as far south as this in April.
I can remember snow in May in the Forest of Dean in the 1980s but that was definitely a one off. Can’t remember them even having significant snow in late March since then.
She was one of the huge reservoir of talent labour had on its backbenches waiting to make a comeback when Corbyn left. Hardly any of them have made a mark. The one who has surprised me, and she is not leadership material, is Jess Phillips who has just got on with the job and made a few Appearances at the right time to talk about her brief and been pretty good. I’m not a great fan of hers but I think she’s maturing as a politician.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3342339/#Comment_3342339
I don’t think we would have heard quite so much about that had she been a man, given Corbyn’s admirers have spent years telling us that his policies weren’t that socialist really.
Anyone but Corbyn was the right choice.
Likely that the pro-EU side would've won the referendum, Faragian UKIP would've posed a significant threat to the Conservatives (and maybe Labour in the north of England), we may well have been lumbered with (or improved) the EU vaccine scheme.
Cameron gets succeeded by Osborne. We had a General Election last year, possible hung Parliament between blues, reds, and, fittingly, purples.
She might do better were she to run again. The purge of neo-liberals is over.
1) The reason he gave;
2) If he was there and Starmer wasn’t he would look as if he was exploiting the Duke’s death for political ends, which even though I’m sure he would have no objection to doing so, might backfire.
PS, in this country politicians ‘stand,’ they do not ‘run.’ We are not Yanks.
https://canoe.com/life/royals/meghan-markle-ripped-online-for-flying-to-nyc-baby-shower-in-private-jet
HIPS don’t lie.
https://twitter.com/redhistorian/status/1380209009236525060
Using a private jet? Oh, that carbon footprint.....
I stand by the fact Starmer was clearly the best candidate standing in 2019 and Labour could have done a lot, lot worse.
Right now he needs to continue quietly reforming the party and getting the nutters out. Some polling was missed the other day but Jewish voters rate his performance so far, so there is some evidence he is making strides on that front.
Now after all this, there’s a good chance he loses in 2024. I’m not making firm predictions either way and I am stunned others are bearing in mind how much egg people have got on their faces in the past but each to their own.
If the biggest achievement Starmer makes is bringing some respect and honour back to Labour and putting it into a position where a leader can come through to win then that’s good enough for me frankly.
There are misogynists in all parties, racists too. Simply put: there is an arsehole element in every population, whether doctors, teachers, police or politicians. It is intrinsic to the human condition.
I think Rayner would have beaten Starmer if she had got the better end of the Granita pact with her housemate RLB.
She did highlight the lack of support for the self employed in the early days. Other than that I am struggling to remember a position that differs materially from the government.
I still don't think that they were a good idea.
As least with Meghan we know she has, as well as her husband, been extraordinarily disloyal to the family and in the full glare of publicity, with the express intent of causing upset and distress and consequently now deserves the criticism she is getting in full measure. I doubt she will ever set foot in the UK again.....
IIRC the conveyancing process is quite different between England and Scotland.
For many people it's enough that it runs without returning an obvious error message, and they don't even think to check that it does what they intended.
When I started as a lawyer the contract by buy or sell a house was concluded quite swiftly making it binding on both parties with clear rights of damages if the contract was not fulfilled. It was an excellent system putting the risk of inability to perform on the party unable to perform. Sadly since then the practice has developed of leaving the contract open until the last minute which puts us in much the same position as England and means nearly all the risk is being borne by the seller.
There is an example of this that sometimes does the rounds with a calculation of the form
6+4/2
which is 8, but an unwary user of a calculator can get 5 if they don’t know what they are doing. It’s also a good illustration of why brackets make life clearer than relying on everyone using the same order of operations.
There’s several things that stand out from this one:
1. That the airline booking system can feed nonsense into the dispatch system, that ends up on the actual plane.
2. That someone deliberately coded the title ‘Miss’ to be interpreted as being a child, because it was normal in the country where the software was developed. Where was this, and who signed off that gender-specific specification? The booking system also contains dates of birth, which are obviously a better indicator.
3. The dispatcher (a qualified professional, even if now office-based rather than at the gate) didn’t spot the unusual number of ‘children’ on the flights.
4. The pilots also didn’t enquire with the cabin crew about the large number of children on board.
Thankfully it didn’t make much of a difference this time, but it was rightly classed as a serious incident. If the plane had been carrying, for example, a women’s football team, the error could have been significant enough to affect V speeds and fuel burn. (Although someone might have done a better job at spotting a much bigger error).
These kind of articles make me despair for the future. Endless goalpost shifting. I realise it's not government policy (at present), but it's clearly a sufficiently widely held strand of thought that this sort of thing keeps popping up in the papers.
Seoul and Washington believed to be behind LG-SK battery settlement
http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=306965
Seems to have a rather more deft touch than its predecessor in dealing with America’s allies.
There is no problem with Prince Andrew, who has nothing whatsoever proved against him.
And, who when stuff was put to a Court several years ago it was hoicked out by the Judge like a piece of rancid fish.
I'll provide my own stimuli.
There is a growing appreciation among politicians that the inoculation programme is not a cure-all. While efficacious for most, vaccination does not guarantee protection for everyone and about half the country still hasn’t had a shot. “Monday’s reopening should be OK,” says one person at the heart of decision-making, before adding the critical caveat “but a lot depends on human behaviour.” There’s the potential for infection rates to take off again if a lot of the public take it as a cue to dramatically reduce compliance with social distancing.
Scientists aren’t certain when a new surge will happen, but there is a consensus that there will be one.
Then there’s the spectre that causes the iciest shivers down the spine of Whitehall: encountering a mutation that is vaccine-evasive. “That would take us back to square one,” groans one senior Tory. Actually, it probably wouldn’t be quite that awful, because vaccines can be adapted to respond, but it would certainly be a massively demoralising setback.
The scientific advice to unlock with caution has been the dominant influence on Mr Johnson since the new year, when he was finally forced to learn from his previous blunders. Fear of the response from Tory MPs was a significant factor in some of his gravest mistakes, imposing lockdowns too slowly and trying to get out of them with dangerous haste. The noise they generate has waxed and waned in inverse correlation with the death toll. When fatalities are rising, they go mute. Not much was heard from the let-it-rippers in January when the virus had been allowed to explode out of control because Mr Johnson followed their urgings by spurning the scientific advice to have a pre-emptive autumn lockdown. When death rates are falling, often thanks to the very measures that they fume about, they turn up the volume again.
When he first set out his “roadmap”, Mr Johnson declared that Britain’s emergence from this lockdown would be “cautious but irreversible”. He was not in a position to make such a promise, but he stands a better chance of keeping it if he listens to the scientists and shuts his ears to the siren voices in the Tory party and the rightwing media who have lured him on to the rocks before.
Dublin asks for summit on Northern Ireland violence
-And Boris Johnson says: No
Easier just… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1381169896189538306
They thought that Xavier Bertrand was in with a good shot. Admittedly I was teasing them about the prospect of a Melenchon - Le Pen run off in round 2 (“Alien vs Predator”)
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-top-challengers-opposition-france-presidential-election-2022/amp/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-kariko.html
... For her entire career, Dr. Kariko has focused on messenger RNA, or mRNA — the genetic script that carries DNA instructions to each cell’s protein-making machinery. She was convinced mRNA could be used to instruct cells to make their own medicines, including vaccines.
But for many years her career at the University of Pennsylvania was fragile. She migrated from lab to lab, relying on one senior scientist after another to take her in. She never made more than $60,000 a year....
Which it is.
Monitoring is obvs necessary, and trigger levels need to be such that action can be taken before it gets out of control, and the dynamics are understood wrt to a vaccinated population.
I have no problem with that, as long as we keep the number of hotspots low and the methodology appropriate.
There's also quite a bit of wibble in it of course, but it's the Observer on a Sunday.
Genuinely, I really really don’t understand why Cooper is so highly rated. She was useless as a Cabinet minister. Can anyone point out 3 original thoughts or good decisions she has made?
Thank whoever you pray to, for all these scientists doing good work, often for many years and for little reward or recognition.
Cooper didn't lose because she was female, just as Burnham didn't lost because he was male. Corbyn won because Cooper and Burnham both ran absolutely dreadful campaigns that did nothing to appeal to those in the party who wanted change. They made no attempt at all to tickle the sweet spot of the soft left, let alone the hard left. They came across as continuity Cameron/Osborne, offering no way out of austerity. They had to offer at least some red meat to the party; they didn't. I intended to vote for Cooper from the outset, but after the campaign only did so with a very heavy heart. They let Corbyn win.
Meghan doesn’t want to go and has doctors advice (which will be genuine if she is 3rd trimester - although the risk is about the chance the baby may be born early vs any health issue & so isn’t really a risk in her case as she’d get great care regardless).
Boris - where numbers are limited it’s right he steps back. HMQ, C&C, W&K, H, A&T, Peter, Zara & Mike Tindall, A, B&E+2, E&S+2. You are already at 20 before you have included great grandkids (3 for W&K) plus 2-3 priests.
Just a current snap shot. Long way to go yet.