The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
I suggest that our PM is more likely than not to try and arrange (nearly typed fix) a quick, high profile Inquiry. Reasons. Horizon was introduced in 1999; when the responsible Minister was Labour. Prosecutions started a couple of years later. Ditto They went on until 2014. Responsible Minister was one of Cameron/Cleggs. DPP from 2008 was Starmer 'who must have known'.... although the PO was deliberately excluding other prosecutors, and taking it's own action.
Boris Johnson sets up Inquiry, people in high places are severely bounced about...... CBE withdrawn????? Looks good for BJ.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
Not just the Tories but the Lib Dems as well given they were in power from 2010 to 2015.
I assume SKS was not directly involved in this when he was in the CPS (my assumption is based on the fact that we would have heard about it by now if he were).
The PM might decide to do something if he needs a distraction, using the fact that no one can really blame him for this one.
My understanding is that SKS is not involved because the CPS was not involved - these were private prosecutions brought by the PO using their in-house prosecution team.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The problem is that metropolitan, woke, right-on, social justice, BLM, green, vegetarian crap isn't 25% of the electorate.
Its more like about 8% of the electorate. Concentrated in a few University constituencies.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
On that definition the NHS was never at risk of meltdown, because we have a centralised system that was always going to ration care, when it was overwhelmed with a level of demand that it could not service. More than that - there was no level of demand that would cause meltdown of the NHS, even if it was reduced to only providing intensive care to the under-40s because of the level of demand.
The difference in India appears to be that they do not have the central organisation to enforce this rationing.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
You need to remember that Eton has a relatively low representation from London. It’s very much a rural and international community.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
And the government is not dumb. So why did they do it?
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The Joe Biden strategy. This is what Starmer is going for IMHO but it does rest on Johnson digging a hole for himself
A curious approach - not least because it claims by omission that Mses Symonds/Allegra [edit] are making no fourth contribution to a purportedly triple force acting on Mr Johnson.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
On that definition the NHS was never at risk of meltdown, because we have a centralised system that was always going to ration care, when it was overwhelmed with a level of demand that it could not service. More than that - there was no level of demand that would cause meltdown of the NHS, even if it was reduced to only providing intensive care to the under-40s because of the level of demand.
The difference in India appears to be that they do not have the central organisation to enforce this rationing.
If it had got to the point that the the bodies were stacking up in the streets because the NHS didn’t have the capacity to treat them all, I think the press & the UK population would have described that as 'the NHS melting down', your personal definition notwithstanding.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The 'unelectability' of Labour is decided by 2 or 3 million voters who voted Labour before and didn't recently, voting Tory instead. Until Labour has a broad and coherent middling strategy that seems to make a better and more plausible offer to Mansfield man and Bassetlaw woman than the Tories they have a problem.
Every time the Pidcock tendency speak of Tory scum, vermin, 'Never kissed a Tory' blah blah they are showing contempt for the 2 or 3 million people whose support they need. Tories get this. Labour doesn't.
(I shall carry on voting Labour for Police Commissioner, local council and so on but they are way off persuading me to even think about them as a national government).
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
The Remain vote was piled very high in not that many seats. Nearly 100% of Gibraltar (that has no seats), very high in Scotland, nationalist Northern Ireland, and the cities
Leave took an overwhelming majority of seats, by not as high a margin. In FPTP terms it was much more efficient.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
Yep, agreed. It's keep the new base and win back some of the old. The opposite, win back the old base and keep some of the new is not a goer. There comes a point where if core values are genuinely disconnected then such is life. The WWC Leave demographic, like you say, are not all driven mainly by nationalism and 'trad' social conservative values, rather than hard-headed economic concerns, and therein lies the target. Win back those guys and gals. This, plus expanding the new base, plus a chunk of floating voters looking for integrity and competence after 5 years of the Boris Johnson show, can deliver' Labour biggest party' at the next GE.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
The point above about the left behind towns being drained of the youngsters who go to university and don’t return is a good one, something similar has happened for years in my home town, Knottingley, in Yvette Cooper’s constituency.
It, along with the wider Wakefield district, voted leave massively. Interestingly, in the last local elections after decades of three Labour cllrs we voted in a Lib Dem - the general consensus was ‘we don’t like the Lib Dem stance on Europe but we’re sick of getting fuck all from Wakefield Council, so we’ll put in a Lib Dem, a locally born candidate, to shake it up a bit’. It looks like a Lib Dem will win this time round for similar reasons - the Labour candidate isn’t from here which won’t help Labour.
We’re also basically destined, it seems, to become a commuter town for Leeds. They’re chucking up houses here, which my opinion is no bad thing. Hopefully we will get some younger blood in from people priced out of Leeds, with benefits for the town economically and making it a bit less parochial and Leavery.
So I guess the point I’m lumbering towards is that although Labour is suffering currently in Leavery places, it probably won’t last for ever.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
Good point, but can't he already? 🤔
By country I meant United Kingdom. 100% of Scotland's constituencies from memory were Remain so strip them out and England is probably closer to three quarters Leave. Not seen England only figures.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
Come on Nick, the Red Wall IS the Labour Party.
If we don't appeal to working class communities across the country then we might as well pack up and go home.
Some might feel more comfortable hand wringing with the north London dinner party set, but we won't form a government by fixating on the pet causes of those who can stroll through life with nothing more to worry about than whether Waitrose will have a supply of Good Brie.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
Good point, but can't he already? 🤔
By country I meant United Kingdom. 100% of Scotland's constituencies from memory were Remain so strip them out and England is probably closer to three quarters Leave. Not seen England only figures.
Even better point. Which reinforces your thesis ...
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
Both parties have had to solve the same problem, of winning elections when the country is divided over big issues not on party lines. The Tories have, so far, managed it. Labour still look all over the place.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
But we did come close to a 1st world equivalent of meltdown, something akin to Italy. In both peaks we had hospitals in London overwhelmed for a short period and people dying who would not have done if capacity had been there.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
Good point, but can't he already? 🤔
By country I meant United Kingdom. 100% of Scotland's constituencies from memory were Remain so strip them out and England is probably closer to three quarters Leave. Not seen England only figures.
Even better point. Which reinforces your thesis ...
The England vote was 46.6 Remain, 53.4 Leave. Not much in it really.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
That's an either/or choice. Labour need an And strategy to get above 40%+. I've written a thread header on here before on how they could do that, and it depends on building a positive unifying vision for the future of Britain that takes the broadcast coalition with them - and they could easily outflank the Tories on Unionism at the same time too.
It does depend upon ditching a few niche hobby horses though or, at least , not making them the centre of your platform and finding moderate solutions to advance them rather than dogmatic ones.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
But we did come close to a 1st world equivalent of meltdown, something akin to Italy. In both peaks we had hospitals in London overwhelmed for a short period and people dying who would not have done if capacity had been there.
Did we?
Didn't the CFR go up because the new variant is more deadly?
Then it came back down because of vaccines.
I don't think that's proof that people were denied care.
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
We never found out who paid for his holiday so it seems very unlikely we will be indulged on this matter.
No we didn't. That's right. I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for reminder. So WTF did pay for that holiday then? And most importantly, what were they promised in return? Just a little smoocherooni or something a bit more meaty?
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The corruption stories demonstrate we need a change of government.
In first past the post, that’s Labour.
The vaccine rollout shows that governments can do things.
The opportunity for Labour is to show how we can now ‘win the peace’.
My sense is that if you insert the current sleaze narrative into a scenario where the vaccine roll-out is not going as well as it is, the polling would be looking very different. However, I do think that Labour has done so much to alienate a significant part of the electorate over recent years that even relentless Tory incompetence and grift will not deliver Starmer a majority at the next election. The turnaround is a decade-long job. The first part of it is to deny the Tories a workable majority at the next election. That is doable.
I wouldn’t want to predict 2024 or 2029 right now. I can pretty much see any outcome. There is too much up in the air.
If I were Labour leader I would be modelling my approach on Attlee. A beautiful mix of doorstep radicalism and dull competence to win the peace.
We’re coming out of this crisis with wounds to heal. Social democracy is well placed to make a comeback.
Attlee was a firm patriot. Interesting you didn't mention that.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
And the government is not dumb. So why did they do it?
I think I'd like to see the workings-out that allow you to say that the government is not dumb.
One of the smart things Johnson tends to do is delegate the hard work to others, while he provides the oomph and pizzazz. That's fine, though he has lost a lot of his team in the last two years. One of the curiosities of Operation Diss Dom is the allegation that Boris himself made the phone calls. Not a good idea, if true.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
A word whose definition depends on context is one I would try to find a substitute for if I want to be understood. Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Labour real value here. I expect them to hold, albeit narrowly.
As a one time Labour enthusiast I'd prefer they lost Hartlepool. I don't see not attracting Hartlepudlians as anything other than a good thing. What does it say about a party that they are attractive to vast numbers of Brexiteers?
That a lot of people think they offer a better life and future for the country?
Unless your support base becomes literal neo-Nazis or something I think popularity is a good thing for a political movement.
Except you have to appease your support base. This is what screwed up Labour at the last election. Because of Hartlepool type seats several Labour MPs couldn't be as pro Remain as they would otherwise have been so they looked all over the place
Because about two-thirds of the seats in this country are Leave. So you want to write off two-thirds of the seats in this country?
Works for me. Go for it!
Without a detailed analysis, given that the vote was 52-48 on a 72% poll that seems to me to be overstating things.
Also, 'country' is ambiguous. If Mr Starmer goes all Brexity then he can forget about Scotland.
Good point, but can't he already? 🤔
By country I meant United Kingdom. 100% of Scotland's constituencies from memory were Remain so strip them out and England is probably closer to three quarters Leave. Not seen England only figures.
Even better point. Which reinforces your thesis ...
The England vote was 46.6 Remain, 53.4 Leave. Not much in it really.
That is a heck of a lot in it on FPTP terms.
Especially when the Remain vote was piled disproportionately high in a few cities.
There's a few metropolitan constituencies that are very Remainy, then hundreds and hundreds more Leave.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The 'unelectability' of Labour is decided by 2 or 3 million voters who voted Labour before and didn't recently, voting Tory instead. Until Labour has a broad and coherent middling strategy that seems to make a better and more plausible offer to Mansfield man and Bassetlaw woman than the Tories they have a problem.
Every time the Pidcock tendency speak of Tory scum, vermin, 'Never kissed a Tory' blah blah they are showing contempt for the 2 or 3 million people whose support they need. Tories get this. Labour doesn't.
(I shall carry on voting Labour for Police Commissioner, local council and so on but they are way off persuading me to even think about them as a national government).
You may be right, but they need to win over Mansfield man and Bassetlaw woman without losing the votes of Brighton man and Cambridge woman. Tricky, but doable IMO.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
But we did come close to a 1st world equivalent of meltdown, something akin to Italy. In both peaks we had hospitals in London overwhelmed for a short period and people dying who would not have done if capacity had been there.
Did we?
Didn't the CFR go up because the new variant is more deadly?
Then it came back down because of vaccines.
I don't think that's proof that people were denied care.
We did, yes, in a few hospitals. But not an a grand scale, thankfully, so the statement "Lockdown headed off disaster" is a true one.
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The point is that the Wokeism/national scepticism is already attracting all the votes it'll get and it's a low ceiling.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
It is one of the very worst scandals we have. Far more scandalous and important than anything else at the moment, not least because it involves so many people and institutions behaving badly, possibly criminally, very few of whom, if any, will ever be made to pay for what they did.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
Wasn't it effectively a choice of war or withdraw from China ?
The latter likely leading to the assassination of the military leadership by more enthusiastic junior ranks.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
It is one of the very worst scandals we have. Far more scandalous and important than anything else at the moment, not least because it involves so many people and institutions behaving badly, possibly criminally, very few of whom, if any, will ever be made to pay for what they did.
It is something that Private Eye have been on for years which is how I first heard of it.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The 'unelectability' of Labour is decided by 2 or 3 million voters who voted Labour before and didn't recently, voting Tory instead. Until Labour has a broad and coherent middling strategy that seems to make a better and more plausible offer to Mansfield man and Bassetlaw woman than the Tories they have a problem.
Every time the Pidcock tendency speak of Tory scum, vermin, 'Never kissed a Tory' blah blah they are showing contempt for the 2 or 3 million people whose support they need. Tories get this. Labour doesn't.
(I shall carry on voting Labour for Police Commissioner, local council and so on but they are way off persuading me to even think about them as a national government).
You may be right, but they need to win over Mansfield man and Bassetlaw woman without losing the votes of Brighton man and Cambridge woman. Tricky, but doable IMO.
In Cambridge the Tories got less than 1/6th of the vote.
The key is not to try and win every vote in certain constituencies, it is to win the plurality of the vote in the majority of the constituencies.
Labour can afford to lose some Brighton and Cambridge votes to the Lib Dems or Greens if it means taking middle England voters off the Tories.
Thankfully they seem in no mood to learn that lesson. 😀
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
Come on Nick, the Red Wall IS the Labour Party.
If we don't appeal to working class communities across the country then we might as well pack up and go home.
Some might feel more comfortable hand wringing with the north London dinner party set, but we won't form a government by fixating on the pet causes of those who can stroll through life with nothing more to worry about than whether Waitrose will have a supply of Good Brie.
Roger is typical of those not listening to you - he hates Hartlepool and wants L:abour to lose. That is how bad it is.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
How does a refund work here to the satisfaction of anyone?
X gives Y £100k Y refunds X £100k
What is to stop X then giving Y the £100k back after its refunded, if they were able to give it under the radar in the first place.
Ask Bernie Eccelstone?
Err, I am not a Labour party member or fan, that happened 24 years ago. If it is your best defence of corruption that someone else did something 24 years ago, it is not a good sign.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I could see natural organic sustainable meat being supplemented by synthetic real meat for the mass market, similarly to how industralised factories and feedstocks are now - just replacing them.
You'd get high quality sustainable herds for the former, preserving the gene pool and with very high animal welfare standards, whilst still making meat affordable for the masses on the latter.
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The corruption stories demonstrate we need a change of government.
In first past the post, that’s Labour.
The vaccine rollout shows that governments can do things.
The opportunity for Labour is to show how we can now ‘win the peace’.
My sense is that if you insert the current sleaze narrative into a scenario where the vaccine roll-out is not going as well as it is, the polling would be looking very different. However, I do think that Labour has done so much to alienate a significant part of the electorate over recent years that even relentless Tory incompetence and grift will not deliver Starmer a majority at the next election. The turnaround is a decade-long job. The first part of it is to deny the Tories a workable majority at the next election. That is doable.
I wouldn’t want to predict 2024 or 2029 right now. I can pretty much see any outcome. There is too much up in the air.
If I were Labour leader I would be modelling my approach on Attlee. A beautiful mix of doorstep radicalism and dull competence to win the peace.
We’re coming out of this crisis with wounds to heal. Social democracy is well placed to make a comeback.
Attlee was a firm patriot. Interesting you didn't mention that.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
You calling everything woke is what puts people my age off politics to be honest.
It's my most loathed term - and I am 100% sure I am not alone. It's not something that comes up in every day conversation, in fact I can't recall the last time I had a chat about the culture war. It just doesn't matter to anyone under the age of 40 on the ground.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
Yep, agreed. It's keep the new base and win back some of the old. The opposite, win back the old base and keep some of the new is not a goer. There comes a point where if core values are genuinely disconnected then such is life. The WWC Leave demographic, like you say, are not all driven mainly by nationalism and 'trad' social conservative values, rather than hard-headed economic concerns, and therein lies the target. Win back those guys and gals. This, plus expanding the new base, plus a chunk of floating voters looking for integrity and competence after 5 years of the Boris Johnson show, can deliver' Labour biggest party' at the next GE.
The thing is that some of your "new base" values, like hatred of your fellow citizens, hatred of your own country and despising your own flag, are anathema to most of the nation.
There are certain extreme values that are beyond the pale. Once you get into the realms of hate you're typically there.
The Labour Party, like the BNP and other parties built on hatred don't deserve a majority. Let go of the hate and you may have a chance.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
And the government is not dumb. So why did they do it?
I think I'd like to see the workings-out that allow you to say that the government is not dumb.
One of the smart things Johnson tends to do is delegate the hard work to others, while he provides the oomph and pizzazz. That's fine, though he has lost a lot of his team in the last two years. One of the curiosities of Operation Diss Dom is the allegation that Boris himself made the phone calls. Not a good idea, if true.
Boris is a fan of Lynton Crosby's dead cat tactic, and was one of the first to write about it. Otoh, he is also a fan of red wine. So probably Boris set this story running in order to hide some greater scandal (and quite urgently!) but there's an outside chance his judgement was impaired at the time.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
How does a refund work here to the satisfaction of anyone?
X gives Y £100k Y refunds X £100k
What is to stop X then giving Y the £100k back after its refunded, if they were able to give it under the radar in the first place.
Ask Bernie Eccelstone?
Err, I am not a Labour party member or fan, that happened 24 years ago. If it is your best defence of corruption that someone else did something 24 years ago, it is not a good sign.
I think the point about the Eccelstone affair is that a lot of people got very excited over what seemed an obviously huge scandal, but it had absolutely no effect on the polls because the party of government was riding high doing popular things. It is very possible that the same thing will happen here, or it could be seen by future historians as the point where the wheels came off for Boris. It’s not a defence of corruption, more a judgement of what effect it is likely to have on how and when we get a new PM.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
It is one of the very worst scandals we have. Far more scandalous and important than anything else at the moment, not least because it involves so many people and institutions behaving badly, possibly criminally, very few of whom, if any, will ever be made to pay for what they did.
I heard an interview yesterday with the then Director of Public (NB!) Prosecutions, who clearly was completely unaware of it until now. The issue seems to be that private prosecutions were regarded as a private hobby, of no interest to government, so nobody pressed the PO to follow the legally-required rules of disclosure. He was asked how come a government body was using private prosecutions anyway, and still do - apparently benefits prosecutions are mostly pursued in this way - and he said basically yes, good point, they shouldn't be.
It looks to me as though the PO was grossly negligent (just conceivably they didn't know the rules of disclosure, I suppose, but they should have taken legal advice on what they needed to do), while successive governments were simply ignorant of the details and vaguely thought it was some sort of messy private squabble. I was an MP when it all started and I do recall a disagreement between subpostmasters and the PO which seemed to relate to new technology, and I must admit I didn't pay much attention either, thinking it would no doubt be sorted out - I didn't know anyone was being prosecuted.
The underlying issue (at least according to the R4 programme) is that private prosecutions are regarded by everyone as less serious. Because they are in normal circumstances cases where the DPP has decided there isn't an adequate case and an individual sturbbornly pursues it anyway, the concept is devalued as "probably just some personal obsession". But where people actually get ruined or sent to prison, that's clearly completely unacceptable. I'm not sure that any government or party has deliberately ignored the issue but it certainly needs to be dealt with now.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
A word whose definition depends on context is one I would try to find a substitute for if I want to be understood. Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Strawperson isn't a word you go to in order to be better understood. It's simply ludicrous.
The English language is full of words that mean different things in different contexts. In fact, arguably, context is everything.
If PB Tories repeat that Labour members all despise the UK and the British flag then it must be true I guess.
As I have said time and time again, the majority of Labour members do not. It's the loud minority that should the loudest that make the headlines, despite the fact they no longer have any influence over the party, or its direction.
I really do not like it being implied that I somehow hate the UK, or the flag. I don't, I love this country. I just happen to think its best days are yet to come - there is always more to do.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
I would argue the battleships were actually of negative value. Sure, they had big guns and lots of them. But actually, had they survived then US tactics would have been built around them, not the carriers. And ironically, Pearl Harbor itself demonstrated that carriers were the future hub of naval warfare. The day of the battleship was effectively over due to aircraft, as indeed the fate of Bismarck and later Repulse and Prince of Wales that same year amply demonstrated. They were too big and vulnerable to use close to aircraft, and away from aircraft carriers/land they were of limited practical value.
You’re right of course that the Japanese didn’t intend to miss the aircraft carriers, but it was still a fairly significant blunder not to ascertain where they were before striking.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
You calling everything woke is what puts people my age off politics to be honest.
It's my most loathed term - and I am 100% sure I am not alone. It's not something that comes up in every day conversation, in fact I can't recall the last time I had a chat about the culture war. It just doesn't matter to anyone under the age of 40 on the ground.
You need to go on a journey before you can sensibly engage on the subject. You've simply never been taught anything else and you think objecting to it is simply a mask for being a bigot.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
A word whose definition depends on context is one I would try to find a substitute for if I want to be understood. Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Strawperson isn't a word you go to in order to be better understood. It's simply ludicrous.
The English language is full of words that mean different things in different contexts. In fact, arguably, context is everything.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
A word whose definition depends on context is one I would try to find a substitute for if I want to be understood. Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Strawperson isn't a word you go to in order to be better understood. It's simply ludicrous.
The English language is full of words that mean different things in different contexts. In fact, arguably, context is everything.
That is a bug, not a feature, for many of us (unless we are doing cryptic crosswords).
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
Wasn't it effectively a choice of war or withdraw from China ?
The latter likely leading to the assassination of the military leadership by more enthusiastic junior ranks.
The attacks on SE Asia were, from the Japanese point, essential to secure supplies that the US embargoes had started denying them. That inevitably meant war with the UK and Netherlands - though that was a reasonable strategic risk as there was a fair chance that developments in Europe could resolve that problem. Clearly, bypassing the Philippines and other US bases would leave a much messier and more vulnerable position there but that surely only goes to emphasise why the key Japanese priority should have been to keep the US *out* of a Pacific war. Indeed, the fact that even after Pearl, Washington gave priority to the European theatre strongly suggests that the risk of not attacking it was well worth taking.
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The corruption stories demonstrate we need a change of government.
In first past the post, that’s Labour.
The vaccine rollout shows that governments can do things.
The opportunity for Labour is to show how we can now ‘win the peace’.
My sense is that if you insert the current sleaze narrative into a scenario where the vaccine roll-out is not going as well as it is, the polling would be looking very different. However, I do think that Labour has done so much to alienate a significant part of the electorate over recent years that even relentless Tory incompetence and grift will not deliver Starmer a majority at the next election. The turnaround is a decade-long job. The first part of it is to deny the Tories a workable majority at the next election. That is doable.
I wouldn’t want to predict 2024 or 2029 right now. I can pretty much see any outcome. There is too much up in the air.
If I were Labour leader I would be modelling my approach on Attlee. A beautiful mix of doorstep radicalism and dull competence to win the peace.
We’re coming out of this crisis with wounds to heal. Social democracy is well placed to make a comeback.
Attlee was a firm patriot. Interesting you didn't mention that.
Are you implying Sir Keir Starmer is not?
I was responding to Jonathan's surmation of Attlee and what lay behind his success.
I don't know about Keir. I've only heard him talk about it in the last 9 months. Put it this way: I'd need some serious convincing. For Attlee it was a sincere part of who he was throughout his life.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
You calling everything woke is what puts people my age off politics to be honest.
It's my most loathed term - and I am 100% sure I am not alone. It's not something that comes up in every day conversation, in fact I can't recall the last time I had a chat about the culture war. It just doesn't matter to anyone under the age of 40 on the ground.
You need to go on a journey before you can sensibly engage on the subject. You've simply never been taught anything else and you think objecting to it is simply a mask for being a bigot.
I am under 40 by the way.
I never called you a bigot, I said you calling everything woke is what puts people off politics. It does, it absolutely does.
Don't put words in my mouth, you condescending prat.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
They were being strangled by oil sanctions to the point that pursuing the war in China would have become impossible (I'm not sure if they'd withdrawn from China sanctions would have been relaxed?), and the military were so pig-headed that they felt that was simply unacceptable, so they had to seize oil across Asia. "But that will bring the Americans in!" "OK, we must take the Americans out too."
Which reminds me uneasily of a possible risk that sanctions on Iran lead the hardliners to press ahead recklessly with the nuclear programme - "These sanctions are intolerable therefore we must be prepared to strike back" rather than the rational "These sanction are intolerable so we must change our behaviour to get them lifted".
Casino's posts are an utter borefest about how the Tory Government of the last ten years is secretly pro-wokeism and the country is falling to the wolves and we all must do something about it.
I can't sit around and talk about topics so utterly pointless and irrelevant to the needs of 99% of the population, so I am off for a run. Bye bye
This is why I change my mobile phone number every few years.
There is also concern about Johnson’s phone, which one source described as a “horror show”. The prime minister has retained the same phone number for most of his career - despite advice from officials - and is regularly contacts by MPs, lobbyists and people from the world of business.
The Times has been told that at one point Johnson was contacted directly by a Universal Credit claimant asking for help with their benefit claim, having been given his mobile by a friend. The prime minister referred the issue to the Department for Work and Pensions, which resolved it.
I think that story plays well for Boris.
He fixed the DWP issue. He didn’t care whether it was a donor or not.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
Of course that depends on each individual's requirements of what is a good place to live and work.
And the things associated with buzzing cities - new apartments, trendy craft beer bars, ethnic restaurants can now be found in abundance in the old industrial towns. The era of the only restaurant being a Berni Inn is long gone. Even in Hartlepool:
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
How does a refund work here to the satisfaction of anyone?
X gives Y £100k Y refunds X £100k
What is to stop X then giving Y the £100k back after its refunded, if they were able to give it under the radar in the first place.
Ask Bernie Eccelstone?
Err, I am not a Labour party member or fan, that happened 24 years ago. If it is your best defence of corruption that someone else did something 24 years ago, it is not a good sign.
I think the point about the Eccelstone affair is that a lot of people got very excited over what seemed an obviously huge scandal, but it had absolutely no effect on the polls because the party of government was riding high doing popular things. It is very possible that the same thing will happen here, or it could be seen by future historians as the point where the wheels came off for Boris. It’s not a defence of corruption, more a judgement of what effect it is likely to have on how and when we get a new PM.
And in the short term that was true, as it was here. But then each time the PM does something unpopular with the part of the electorate who voted for him they will gradually start to question is he doing that because he believes it, for electoral success or simply for corruption?
By the end of his term Blair was often referenced, and to this day still is by some on here, as Bliar despite winning landslides.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
The belief was that they could buy six months to quickly secure south-east Asia, and the oil and rubber, and then throw up a defensive cordon across the mid-pacific islands and stalemate America there who'd eventually sue for peace.
It was based on the idea democracies were decadent, weak and divided. It probably had only a 10% chance of working.
Why did they try it? They were desperate. The US oil embargo was really crippling their economy and war effort in China, with no way out unless they stopped, and south-east Asia was so poorly defended it was simply too tempting an answer.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
You calling everything woke is what puts people my age off politics to be honest.
It's my most loathed term - and I am 100% sure I am not alone. It's not something that comes up in every day conversation, in fact I can't recall the last time I had a chat about the culture war. It just doesn't matter to anyone under the age of 40 on the ground.
You need to go on a journey before you can sensibly engage on the subject. You've simply never been taught anything else and you think objecting to it is simply a mask for being a bigot.
I am under 40 by the way.
I never called you a bigot, I said you calling everything woke is what puts people off politics. It does, it absolutely does.
Don't put words in my mouth, you condescending prat.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
It is one of the very worst scandals we have. Far more scandalous and important than anything else at the moment, not least because it involves so many people and institutions behaving badly, possibly criminally, very few of whom, if any, will ever be made to pay for what they did.
I heard an interview yesterday with the then Director of Public (NB!) Prosecutions, who clearly was completely unaware of it until now. The issue seems to be that private prosecutions were regarded as a private hobby, of no interest to government, so nobody pressed the PO to follow the legally-required rules of disclosure. He was asked how come a government body was using private prosecutions anyway, and still do - apparently benefits prosecutions are mostly pursued in this way - and he said basically yes, good point, they shouldn't be.
It looks to me as though the PO was grossly negligent (just conceivably they didn't know the rules of disclosure, I suppose, but they should have taken legal advice on what they needed to do), while successive governments were simply ignorant of the details and vaguely thought it was some sort of messy private squabble. I was an MP when it all started and I do recall a disagreement between subpostmasters and the PO which seemed to relate to new technology, and I must admit I didn't pay much attention either, thinking it would no doubt be sorted out - I didn't know anyone was being prosecuted.
The underlying issue (at least according to the R4 programme) is that private prosecutions are regarded by everyone as less serious. Because they are in normal circumstances cases where the DPP has decided there isn't an adequate case and an individual sturbbornly pursues it anyway, the concept is devalued as "probably just some personal obsession". But where people actually get ruined or sent to prison, that's clearly completely unacceptable. I'm not sure that any government or party has deliberately ignored the issue but it certainly needs to be dealt with now.
It rather reminds me of what happened in the Sally Clark case. Some 'experts' claimed that something must be true and they were believed.
Personally, if someone told me that their computer system doesn't have bugs, I'd just go away and find one. It doesn't usually take long.
Computer Weekly covered this from the beginning, and I've no idea how it was allowed to drag on like this and affect so many people.
The R4 series (The Great Post Office Trial) is truly shocking if you don't already know the story.
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The corruption stories demonstrate we need a change of government.
In first past the post, that’s Labour.
The vaccine rollout shows that governments can do things.
The opportunity for Labour is to show how we can now ‘win the peace’.
My sense is that if you insert the current sleaze narrative into a scenario where the vaccine roll-out is not going as well as it is, the polling would be looking very different. However, I do think that Labour has done so much to alienate a significant part of the electorate over recent years that even relentless Tory incompetence and grift will not deliver Starmer a majority at the next election. The turnaround is a decade-long job. The first part of it is to deny the Tories a workable majority at the next election. That is doable.
I wouldn’t want to predict 2024 or 2029 right now. I can pretty much see any outcome. There is too much up in the air.
If I were Labour leader I would be modelling my approach on Attlee. A beautiful mix of doorstep radicalism and dull competence to win the peace.
We’re coming out of this crisis with wounds to heal. Social democracy is well placed to make a comeback.
Attlee was a firm patriot. Interesting you didn't mention that.
Are you implying Sir Keir Starmer is not?
I was responding to Jonathan's surmation of Attlee and what lay behind his success.
I don't know about Keir. I've only heard him talk about it in the last 9 months. Put it this way: I'd need some serious convincing. For Attlee it was a sincere part of who he was throughout his life.
One of the more interesting tributes to Attlee was of course in Thatcher’s memoirs The Path to Powerwhich, albeit they were ghost written, still seem to bear her imprint and were checked by her, so we must assume she was happy with what they said.
‘ Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show.’
Casino's posts are an utter borefest about how the Tory Government of the last ten years is secretly pro-wokeism and the country is falling to the wolves and we all must do something about it.
I can't sit around and talk about topics so utterly pointless and irrelevant to the needs of 99% of the population, so I am off for a run. Bye bye
Nope, not at all. I've raised some interesting and balanced points. Some of these threaten you which is why you're getting so upset and agitated - you secretly know there might be something in them - so I'll leave you to enjoy yourself and go on your own journey.
I suspect quite a few PB Tories are underestimating the damage that the Cummings statement could do in the medium term. It's worth a careful read. The PM will, I suspect, be worried by it.
Cummings is clearly so furious that he has committed to print a fairly devastating critique of the workings of No. 10 and the PM's integrity. Why has he done this? Because he could not tolerate the PM/No. 10, 48 hours ago, generating headlines in their favoured press that Cummings was the source of the leaks. He wasn't, because if he was he wouldn't have responded by publishing the statement. Normally, Cummings would defend himself through off-the-record conversations, not by writing a potentially libelous statement calling the PM a liar. There could be more of this to come, both from Cummings and other sources.
It was a serious misjudgment for the PM to pin the leaks on Cummings, one that he will already be regretting. It may be a Westminster bubble story (I don't think it is actually), but sometimes bubbles burst. I don't think any impact will be seen in time for the May elections, though. The SC hearing on 26 May should be in people's diaries.
Calling the PM a liar is hardly libellous.
Not in the way that calling him a fine, upstanding fellow whose word is his bond, would be, no.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
Wasn't it effectively a choice of war or withdraw from China ?
The latter likely leading to the assassination of the military leadership by more enthusiastic junior ranks.
The attacks on SE Asia were, from the Japanese point, essential to secure supplies that the US embargoes had started denying them. That inevitably meant war with the UK and Netherlands - though that was a reasonable strategic risk as there was a fair chance that developments in Europe could resolve that problem. Clearly, bypassing the Philippines and other US bases would leave a much messier and more vulnerable position there but that surely only goes to emphasise why the key Japanese priority should have been to keep the US *out* of a Pacific war. Indeed, the fact that even after Pearl, Washington gave priority to the European theatre strongly suggests that the risk of not attacking it was well worth taking.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
I would argue the battleships were actually of negative value. Sure, they had big guns and lots of them. But actually, had they survived then US tactics would have been built around them, not the carriers. And ironically, Pearl Harbor itself demonstrated that carriers were the future hub of naval warfare. The day of the battleship was effectively over due to aircraft, as indeed the fate of Bismarck and later Repulse and Prince of Wales that same year amply demonstrated. They were too big and vulnerable to use close to aircraft, and away from aircraft carriers/land they were of limited practical value.
You’re right of course that the Japanese didn’t intend to miss the aircraft carriers, but it was still a fairly significant blunder not to ascertain where they were before striking.
Maybe, although I think it's more likely that the central role of the carrier would still have developed, just more slowly, as admirals developed tactics in response to what was seen to be working (or not), rather than as a necessity or resources.
In an ocean-spanning conflict though, battleships are still extremely useful during amphibious operations, both in shore bombardment and in countering enemy naval attacks against the landing craft - though that only works with strong air support.
Absolutely shocking....covid in India...as stated in the Sky report, if this is the meltdown in the more advanced system in the richer cities, whats happens elsewhere in India.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
I would argue the battleships were actually of negative value. Sure, they had big guns and lots of them. But actually, had they survived then US tactics would have been built around them, not the carriers. And ironically, Pearl Harbor itself demonstrated that carriers were the future hub of naval warfare. The day of the battleship was effectively over due to aircraft, as indeed the fate of Bismarck and later Repulse and Prince of Wales that same year amply demonstrated. They were too big and vulnerable to use close to aircraft, and away from aircraft carriers/land they were of limited practical value.
You’re right of course that the Japanese didn’t intend to miss the aircraft carriers, but it was still a fairly significant blunder not to ascertain where they were before striking.
Maybe, although I think it's more likely that the central role of the carrier would still have developed, just more slowly, as admirals developed tactics in response to what was seen to be working (or not), rather than as a necessity or resources.
In an ocean-spanning conflict though, battleships are still extremely useful during amphibious operations, both in shore bombardment and in countering enemy naval attacks against the landing craft - though that only works with strong air support.
Nowadays, on the latter, we can do that with a mixture of naval cannons and smart missile and phalanx so that only destroyers are necessary.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
How does a refund work here to the satisfaction of anyone?
X gives Y £100k Y refunds X £100k
What is to stop X then giving Y the £100k back after its refunded, if they were able to give it under the radar in the first place.
Ask Bernie Eccelstone?
Err, I am not a Labour party member or fan, that happened 24 years ago. If it is your best defence of corruption that someone else did something 24 years ago, it is not a good sign.
There have been arrests in Liverpool Labour council in the past months!
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
That's about it. There were documentaries on R4 being done way back.
For me I think the underlying issues (in addition to injustice to individuals) are:
1 - Who can be a prosecution authority? 2 - Level playing field. 3 - Holding ALMOs to account via Parliament.
The complacency and hubris shown by Tories is as palpable as it is reminiscent of other untouchable administrations in the past.
If you have seriously read this thread you know that is simply not true.
Eh? I’ve read it.
The stuff about the electorate not caring, it all being priced in, that Tory party values being more in line, the opposition being weak and divided and that people will vote for Boris anyway is truly complacent and straight out of the New Labour copybook in its final years.
The Tories are delivering a hugely successful vaccine roll-out. Voters really like it. The polls reflect this - both in party vote share and personal ratings. None of this should be a surprise. Extrapolating that to a much wider narrative when prior to the roll-out Labour was getting opinion poll leads and the PM's personal ratings were deeply negative is a bit of a stretch. I think that the 10 million plus people who voted Labour across the UK in 2019 were mistaken to back a party led by Jeremy Corbyn, but I struggle to believe that they and the millions of others who supported the Greens and the LibDems are all anti-British wokeists. I think it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The corruption stories demonstrate we need a change of government.
In first past the post, that’s Labour.
The vaccine rollout shows that governments can do things.
The opportunity for Labour is to show how we can now ‘win the peace’.
My sense is that if you insert the current sleaze narrative into a scenario where the vaccine roll-out is not going as well as it is, the polling would be looking very different. However, I do think that Labour has done so much to alienate a significant part of the electorate over recent years that even relentless Tory incompetence and grift will not deliver Starmer a majority at the next election. The turnaround is a decade-long job. The first part of it is to deny the Tories a workable majority at the next election. That is doable.
I wouldn’t want to predict 2024 or 2029 right now. I can pretty much see any outcome. There is too much up in the air.
If I were Labour leader I would be modelling my approach on Attlee. A beautiful mix of doorstep radicalism and dull competence to win the peace.
We’re coming out of this crisis with wounds to heal. Social democracy is well placed to make a comeback.
Attlee was a firm patriot. Interesting you didn't mention that.
Are you implying Sir Keir Starmer is not?
Starmer may well be. There are plenty in prominent positions within Labour who aren't though. That certainly couldn't have been argued of the Labour of 1945.
The Post Office scandal. A question. Am I right in thinking that this is a continuous scandal of government and a government public body, the PO, from 1996 to today and continuing?
And because this involves lengthy terms of Labour and Tory government this will be met with:
The highest practicable degree of silence from both Tory and Labour An enthusiastic desire to pay up compensation (out of our money) in large doses Political agreement to hold an enquiry reporting well into the future Every attempt, agreed by Labour and Tory, to ensure that the actually guilty people are not prosecuted.
I hope for better than that - and people who knowingly see innocent people go to prison and do nothing in order to save themselves deserve massive 10 year type sentences - but it will be interesting to watch.
I think this court case is actually the end of the sequence not the beginning. But apart from that you are broadly right.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
That's an either/or choice. Labour need an And strategy to get above 40%+. I've written a thread header on here before on how they could do that, and it depends on building a positive unifying vision for the future of Britain that takes the broadcast coalition with them - and they could easily outflank the Tories on Unionism at the same time too.
It does depend upon ditching a few niche hobby horses though or, at least , not making them the centre of your platform and finding moderate solutions to advance them rather than dogmatic ones.
I don't disagree (and I'm really as uninterested in ostentatious patriotism as you get without being actually insane). I don't think most voters (even most Tory voters) consciously think that they're primarily voting about patriotism and anti-wokism. They want to be basically confident that a party has the country's interests at heart before they'll even consider them, but they don't need them to keep going on about it, which if anything arouses suspicion ("The more he talked of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons"). Conversely, they'll accept a few hobby-horses if they feel that the main thrust of the party is relevant to them - if they feel Labour will make them more secure and better off, while also wanting to be nicer to some asylum-seekers, there are plenty of traditional working-class voters who will see that as a tolerable package. It's a snobbish mistake to think that Red Wall voters are mostly bigots, but they do want to be seen as first priority.
Honestly attacking Dom Cummings then expecting him not to respond is as dumb as allowing international air travel, especially from India attacking the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and not expecting them to respond.
Pearl Harbor was arguably the greatest strategic mistake ever. Even bigger than Singapore’s infamous guns. Even bigger than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
What sort of imbecile attacks the world’s largest navy and seriously pisses them off, while at the same time missing the only three capital ships of actual value in the Pacific Fleet?
To be fair, missing the carriers wasn't intentional (and the battleships sunk and/or seriously damaged were of genuine value too) - though neither of those points was a strategic mistake; that being the attack on Pearl in the first place, which, you rightly describe as the worst strategic decision ever. How was Japan ever going to win a war against the US (and, simultaneously, China, the UK and others) and if it wasn't winnable, why the fuck initiate it?
I would argue the battleships were actually of negative value. Sure, they had big guns and lots of them. But actually, had they survived then US tactics would have been built around them, not the carriers. And ironically, Pearl Harbor itself demonstrated that carriers were the future hub of naval warfare. The day of the battleship was effectively over due to aircraft, as indeed the fate of Bismarck and later Repulse and Prince of Wales that same year amply demonstrated. They were too big and vulnerable to use close to aircraft, and away from aircraft carriers/land they were of limited practical value.
You’re right of course that the Japanese didn’t intend to miss the aircraft carriers, but it was still a fairly significant blunder not to ascertain where they were before striking.
Maybe, although I think it's more likely that the central role of the carrier would still have developed, just more slowly, as admirals developed tactics in response to what was seen to be working (or not), rather than as a necessity or resources.
In an ocean-spanning conflict though, battleships are still extremely useful during amphibious operations, both in shore bombardment and in countering enemy naval attacks against the landing craft - though that only works with strong air support.
Nowadays, on the latter, we can do that with a mixture of naval cannons and smart missile and phalanx so that only destroyers are necessary.
Cummo’s account seems the most credible, both at face value and because of the detail backing it up, and the offer to provide further evidence and answer questions.
Which puts us in the position where the PM personally decided to get his hands dirty phoning the press to spread what he knew were a pack of lies. Presumably to deflect attention away from one of Carrie’s friends.
No-one gives a toss what Cummings says about Boris. People think the former is an off-the-wall sociopath who dislikes everyone and the latter an opportunistic chancer who professes to like everyone, but is actually a ruthless politican. It's all priced in already.
Total Westminster bubble story. The journalists are too close to the action and getting overexcited and the opposition too desperate to believe they have a chance to take the Government down.
Somehow don’t think you would be saying this if the leaks had come from Blair or Brown’s Downing St.
This is clearly serious and more than a bubble story. It contains preferential treatment for donors , Tories ‘using Covid’ , accusations of madness and toxicity at the heart of government.
I appreciate you want it to go away, not least because it questions why on Earth anyone can support this.
No. I'm on record here (repeatedly) for attacking the self-interest, cronyism and low-level corruption of this administration - and, I think Boris only cares about himself.
But, that's not going to dent Government support because their policies and values are simply far more in tune with the electorate. It will only do so once the opposition have already got to an electable position first.
That the clown would rather refund the downing street decorating donors, than reveal who they are, does make who they might be an important question, of legitimate public interest.
Yep. That's what's going to bring about a change of Government in the United Kingdom after 11 years.
Downing Street decorators.
You're trying your favourite straw person trick again. I simply said it was a question of legitimate public interest. Which it is.
It's strawman (it means straw(hu)man; only Wokeies say "strawperson" because they're afraid of misgendering a scarecrow and being accused of misogyny -normal people think that's nuts) and yes such questions should always be asked but the theme of this thread is that this is Der Untergang.
Now it's distraction (and with error, since the term began as 'man of straw')
Who handed over money to the PM to decorate his home is a question of legitimate public interest.
Man is short for human. In the context you describe it was used as shorthand for our species, hence "what a piece of work is man" as written by Shakespeare in Hamlet in reference to the human condition. It is derogated from human to apply to words all across our language, including man and woman by the way, and the idea we must qualify explicitly that an scarecrow used for target practice is genderless to avoid offence is laughable. People simply do this to demonstrate their Woke credentials which is banal, self-absorbed, mildly pompous and trivialises any serious real world issues of gender equality that still need to be addressed.
You said yourself you weren't that Woke. So stop it.
“Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
From the same speech...
That doesn't disprove my point. Like I said both Man and Woman are derivatives of Human, and Man can be used as an abbreviation for the species Hu(man) or as a reference to a specific gender - depending on the context.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
A word whose definition depends on context is one I would try to find a substitute for if I want to be understood. Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Strawperson isn't a word you go to in order to be better understood. It's simply ludicrous.
The English language is full of words that mean different things in different contexts. In fact, arguably, context is everything.
‘Straw person’ is a bit corny.
I thank you.
I think it may be time for everyone to bail out of this argument before it escalates.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
On that definition the NHS was never at risk of meltdown, because we have a centralised system that was always going to ration care, when it was overwhelmed with a level of demand that it could not service. More than that - there was no level of demand that would cause meltdown of the NHS, even if it was reduced to only providing intensive care to the under-40s because of the level of demand.
The difference in India appears to be that they do not have the central organisation to enforce this rationing.
Oxygen is not intensive care, it is normal emergency care. Parts of India are out of oxygen.
Indeed there is a case in such situations to stop intensive care, in order to free up oxygen, medical and nursing care for ward patients whose prognosis is much better with relatively light interventions compared to ventilation. Obviously those then needing ICU will nearly all die, but ward patients will survive.
If PB Tories repeat that Labour members all despise the UK and the British flag then it must be true I guess.
As I have said time and time again, the majority of Labour members do not. It's the loud minority that should the loudest that make the headlines, despite the fact they no longer have any influence over the party, or its direction.
I really do not like it being implied that I somehow hate the UK, or the flag. I don't, I love this country. I just happen to think its best days are yet to come - there is always more to do.
They don't all but enough of them do and they're not being disowned.
On this very site we've got the likes of Roger and Kinabalu that hate their country and countrymen, hate the flag, find flying the flag to be obnoxious and would leave the Party if it were accepted or normal.
You are more moderate. But you need to make a choice, do you wish to align yourself with the likes of them, or the likes of Hartlepool and Red Wall voters.
If you want the likes of Red Wall voters to give you the time of day you need to disown those who openly despise them. You can't have both.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
Voting left wing and being left wing are two different things. Lots of people have a spell of voting left wing, especially when young. Some stick to it, but not many. Vanishingly few people live left wing lives with regard to their own prospects, property, family, career, opportunity, wealth, expropriation, revolution etc.
Nearly all of us are some sort of social democrat - and we are run by a social democrat government right now.
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
The point @Casino_Royale was making is the two legacy parts of the Labour coalition (three if you include the specific appeal to minorities).
I think Labour can probably manage to bridge 2 but not 3. It’s not easy to resolve the problem and I’m not going to promise to have a magic solution for you 😁
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I could see natural organic sustainable meat being supplemented by synthetic real meat for the mass market, similarly to how industralised factories and feedstocks are now - just replacing them.
You'd get high quality sustainable herds for the former, preserving the gene pool and with very high animal welfare standards, whilst still making meat affordable for the masses on the latter.
I think that could work.
The other point about synthesised foods is that the variety will be huge, and will also cater to the high end. That doesn’t, of course, mean that livestock farming will end any time soon, if ever. But the need for it, either nutritionally or for taste satisfaction, will greatly diminish.
The scope for synthetic biology is immense, and very large investments are being directed into the nascent industry. Early players like Ginkgo Bioworks (which got $1bn loan funding from the Trump administration to aid vaccine manufacturing) could become the next very big thing.
I think this goes hand in hand with the corruption stories. No one responsible will suffer much, indeed the chief executive Paula Vennells got a CBE and a job in the cabinet office!
People in power can do as they please, break rules and not suffer consequences.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
I think you're wrong about the bit in bold. I remember @MaxPB talking about CFR by age that showed the fatality rate for older age groups increasing a lot during the peak of our latest wave - a sign that the NHS was rationing care and concentrating on treating the younger patients who benefited most.
That's a sign that the NHS was overwhelmed and additional deaths were caused as a result. It just happened in a quieter, more organised, very British way - including that no-one wants to talk about it.
Apologies to Max if I misinterpreted what he posted some weeks ago.
Care, particularly intensive care, was clearly rationed and given to those with the best prospects. But that is not meltdown. Meltdown is what we are seeing in India where hospitals run out of oxygen or Brazil where incubation tubes are inserted without medication. Horrific. We didn't come close.
On that definition the NHS was never at risk of meltdown, because we have a centralised system that was always going to ration care, when it was overwhelmed with a level of demand that it could not service. More than that - there was no level of demand that would cause meltdown of the NHS, even if it was reduced to only providing intensive care to the under-40s because of the level of demand.
The difference in India appears to be that they do not have the central organisation to enforce this rationing.
Oxygen is not intensive care, it is normal emergency care. Parts of India are out of oxygen.
Indeed there is a case in such situations to stop intensive care, in order to free up oxygen, medical and nursing care for ward patients whose prognosis is much better with relatively light interventions compared to ventilation. Obviously those then needing ICU will nearly all die, but ward patients will survive.
Horrific.
Is there anything we can do to help? It's absolutely awful. 😢
While I'm here, as ever those of us aligned to Labour are grateful for the advice from Casino and other PB Tories about why Labour is unelectable and what it should do about it. The advice seems to be as follows:
1. Labour holds the white w/c, especially in the north and midlands, in contempt and doesn't share their values. To have any chance of winning back these voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the total), Labour needs to dump their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap and go back to a good, honest patriotic party that aligns with the values of the white w/c.
2. The metropolitan, woke, right-on middle class don't share the values of the northern, midland white w/c. Labour should stop trying to appeal to such metropolitan voters (let's imagine they comprise 25% of the electorate) by telling them to stick their woke, social justice, BLM, green vegetarian crap up their backsides so that we can win the votes of the 25% under 1.
I'm not persuaded that this is a winning strategy for Labour, however, Somehow, I think they need to keep the voters in 2. and peel off some of the voters in 1., not all of whom fit the stereotype I've outlined in 1.
For me - and forced to label myself it would probably be Orange Booker, with adjustments in some areas - the thing that renders it unconscionable (though maybe Blair, once) to vote Labour is control by Trades Unions. For me, that has to go - either by depoliticising TUs, or making them multi-party.
And they will not reform that because McCluskey would stop them (which llustrates the problem).
On 1, there can be a place for all of that as a set of views, but not atomised identity politics to the exclusion of all else.
On 2, I don't think that metrowoke (to coin a word) represents what they think it does.
As the rest of society continues to integrate without all the political aggro, they may find themselves on a sandcastle as the tide comes in. There's already a stark contrast between the single issue types who need division to maintian their powerbase, and the rest of the world.
1. Prosecutions brought by private bodies do tend to lead to abuse of this type. The RSPCA has had similar complaints and when I was a government lawyers decades ago (I was at the time dealing with wildlife matters, amongst others) they had a terrible reputation for being over-zealous and paying no regard to the law.
2. The Post Office did have ministerial oversight of a type so when this started being an issue, Ministers should have got more involved.
3. Judges are there to ensure that trials - whether they're brought privately or by the CPS - are handled in accordance with the rules. It's not clear to me whether there has been any judicial failing here.
4. My best guess is that the failure was mainly that of the Post Office who failed to carry out any sort of proper investigation and deliberately or negligently did not disclose the information they knew about the problems with their Horizon system. Fujitsu will also have been at fault. If the information is not disclosed and people lie about what they know, it becomes very hard indeed for defence counsel to do the investigative work needed to show that the prosecution is fundamentally misconceived.
5. The lawyers for the Post Office who did the prosecution also need scrutinising. They know the criminal disclosure rules. The argument that it is a private prosecution and therefore they don't need to worry about this really does not wash. Every solicitor, every barrister has an overriding duty not to mislead the court. If they failed in that duty they should be held to account.
6. Far too many people and institutions have a blind faith in technology and technological solutions, in the belief that because IT is is involved, because it comes from a computer it must be right. Anyone with any real knowledge of technology and the combination of it and human behaviour knows that this is nonsense. It is something which all those - on this forum and elsewhere - advocating technological solutions to some issue or other should bear in mind.
This was a case of a badly flawed system and an arrogant cowardly institution which put its own interests first. But more importantly, it was a case - as all such cases are - of humans making mistakes, lying and covering up, of people doing the wrong thing and of others failing to do the right thing. All involved should feel thoroughly ashamed of their part in this affair. And some of them should face legal consequences for their misbehaviour.
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
Voting left wing and being left wing are two different things. Lots of people have a spell of voting left wing, especially when young. Some stick to it, but not many. Vanishingly few people live left wing lives with regard to their own prospects, property, family, career, opportunity, wealth, expropriation, revolution etc.
Nearly all of us are some sort of social democrat - and we are run by a social democrat government right now.
Minorities from many areas of the world come with ultra conservative right wing views used to vote en masse for the Labour Party because Labour was the party most likely to facilitate their family and friends been able to come and join them.
Interesting that this is breaking down, with people from indian and west african origins now floating towards the Conservatives a bit more. Maybe because it appears a bit like they dont hate their very existence as much anymore.
Interesting that this is breaking down, with people from indian and west african origins now floating towards the Conservatives a bit more. Maybe because it appears a bit like they dont hate their very existence as much anymore.
Priti Patel would not allow her own parents residence here
I think this constituency is a genuine 50:50 call so if you are getting better odds on Labour that is where the value is. Normally it would be a walk in the park for an Opposition but as David identifies the unknown factor is the large Brexit Party vote.
It's interesting that Boris took time out to campaign there. I doubt he would have done that if he wasn't getting told that it was a possible win. But Labour, surely, aren't going backwards from the disaster of 2019, are they?
It is not Labour going backwards, its what happens to Brexit party voters. The Labour vote share will surely increase but probably not by enough to hold off the Tory vote.
If Labour lose they are going backwards. From a disastrously low base. These Brexit voters were in the main 1 time supporters pissed off that the likes of Starmer was frustrating the democratic will. If Labour has not found a way to re-engage with those pissed off voters now that Brexit is done they are in trouble.
It is a fundamental problem that we have discussed on here many times. Labour are now essentially a metropolitan liberal elitist party and have those priorities in the same way that say Hillary had in the US. It means a lot of success in London and other University dominated cities but it means very little to traditional Labour heartlands. It is bizarre that Eton educated Boris speaks something closer to these peoples' language than the leader of a party set up by Trade Unions but it is a fact. If that metropolitan elite want back to power they need to broaden their base.
I think David's leader is accurate - like him I hear snippets suggesting the Tories have a decent chance in Hartlepool, but not a 60% chance.
In response to DavidL's first point, obviously parties always want to regain lost support. But I'm not sure it's easier than gaining floating voters. If you've voted X all your life and then decidde to switch, it's quite a big deal and you buy into it personally. Switching back feels difficult. Labour needs to get most votes nationally. Whether the route to that is over the Red Wall I'm less sure.
I agree. I suspect that Labour could do increasingly well in metropolitan suburbia, particularly in university cities.
@Casino_Royale has a hive of bees in his bonnet, particularly "Wokeness" and vegetarianism, but that is the cultural zeitgeist amongst the university educated, who are now 50% of young people and now having families, moving out to suburbia and commuter towns and taking their cultural values with them.
The problem for many "left behind towns" is that the youngsters leave for university, and don't fancy returning to small town life. They like the buzz, and the opportunities of the cities. I have observed the cultural transformation of Leicester from a gritty post industrial city to a university one over the last 3 decades, as I am sure that you saw in Nottingham. It is a much better place to live and work.
That trend is as dangerous for the Tories as the crumbling of the Red Wall was for Labour. I don't think it will shift enough seats in 2024 though possibly the GE after.
I'm far from convinced young people are that left-wing. Sure, attitudes change with each generation - this one will live in a much more multi-racial society, and one threatened by climate change - so of course they'll be concerned by those issues.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
Voting left wing and being left wing are two different things. Lots of people have a spell of voting left wing, especially when young. Some stick to it, but not many. Vanishingly few people live left wing lives with regard to their own prospects, property, family, career, opportunity, wealth, expropriation, revolution etc.
Nearly all of us are some sort of social democrat - and we are run by a social democrat government right now.
Minorities from many areas of the world come with ultra conservative right wing views used to vote en masse for the Labour Party because Labour was the party most likely to facilitate their family and friends been able to come and join them.
Interesting that this is breaking down, with people from indian and west african origins now floating towards the Conservatives a bit more. Maybe because it appears a bit like they dont hate their very existence as much anymore.
Instead increasingly Labour hates them instead.
The bile towards "racial gatekeepers" and others, it's like the bile towards nationalists.
It takes a while for people to clock on that you hate them sometimes, but when they do, the turning can be brutal.
Interesting that this is breaking down, with people from indian and west african origins now floating towards the Conservatives a bit more. Maybe because it appears a bit like they dont hate their very existence as much anymore.
Priti Patel would not allow her own parents residence here
I dislike Patel and her policies, but she is perfectly entitled to have her views based on what she believes, not who her parents are.
That seems such a self evidently self destructive approach that it lacks credibility. We are worried that X might bad mouth us so let's pick a fight with X beforehand and piss him off. I mean, really?
Someone I know who worked for Boris Johnson put it to me back in January when I wrote this piece about Dom apperaring before inquiries and select committee was
'Dom knows where all the bodies are buried, all 75,000 of them'
Now that figure is somewhere between 125,000 and 150,000.
Even at the time - when Cummings and Johnson were still close - the former advisor was privately deeply critical of some of the decisions the prime minister took.
Cummings believed that at key moments - particularly in early Autumn last year - Johnson recklessly prioritised keeping the economy open over the clear scientific advice about how many more people would die as a result.
Around late September and early October Cummings was so aggravated by Johnson’s decision not to impose a third lockdown that he printed out an A3 sheet of case rates and deaths, and carried it around in his daily business.
“He walked around Whitehall showing it to everyone. Literally everyone,” one source said. “He opened up a meeting about civil service reform by getting it out and explaining why it showed we need to lock down.”
But that is so easy to handle, difficult judgments, the cost of lockdown not only in money but in lives as people driven to despair, other views were possible etc etc. It won't go anywhere. Its quite possible that Cummings showed better judgment on this than the PM but so what? So did many on here. It makes no difference, we are where we are.
A definite weakness in Boris is his enthusiasm with getting distracted with this kind of fluff. The smart thing to do would be to ignore Cummings completely and suggest that any such evidence will be considered by the government Inquiry in due course. By drawing attention to this in advance and getting involved in leak allegations the PM is diminishing himself and his office. Its stupid.
I think when you look at the number of deaths from January onwards then Boris Johnson's save Christmas strategy, only partially cancelled at the last moment, looks like a sick joke.
I've said I can just about forgive Boris Johnson for his mistakes last March, but he has repeated those mistakes again and again, only introducing lockdown far too late in November when the numbers showed it should have begun in September/October, as was clear at the time, ditto the December one.
And yet we have had months of lockdown at enormous economic cost. Those that went even harder at lockdown than us are dying now in large numbers. Lockdown defers death for a few weeks at a considerable cost. Only vaccines offer a way out. This was Chris Whitty's message a year past March and it is right.
There are or were serious arguments to be had as to whether a country is better to take it on the chin or drag things out by removing peoples' liberty and ability to earn provided that blow to the chin does not overwhelm the NHS causing additional unnecessary deaths like we see in Brazil and India. We never got close to that. If that was the primary objective shouldn't the government have allowed as much freedom as was compatible with that criteria?
It seems to me that there is no clear right or wrong on this. Others, including Cummings, may have done things differently. That is not clearly right or wrong either. It is simply a different set of outcomes with different costs.
Well said. In a pandemic people die, in fact in normal times people die.
What's more abnormal is taking away people's basic civil liberties.
The reason to have a lockdown was to stop the NHS being overwhelmed, not to prevent every single death. If the Government is to be criticised it should be for locking down too hard and too long now, the NHS is nowhere near being overwhelmed and liberties should be restored.
But too many people in this country are prepared to be illiberal so that argument is going nowhere.
They set out a road map to unlocking and are following it. The advantage of predictability is it allows people (and particularly businesses) to plan.
You need to make the case that it is better to introduce a bit of near term uncertainty to accelerate lockdown as well as making the case in the numbers. The risk, of course, is that there is a lot of uncertainty and if things go wrong the government will be blamed for the acceleration regardless of whether it is their fault or not.
If I was cynical I could see an announcement on, say, May 1 that the government’s policies have been so effective that they will accelerate the lifting of restrictions as of May 17.
Comments
Reasons. Horizon was introduced in 1999; when the responsible Minister was Labour.
Prosecutions started a couple of years later. Ditto
They went on until 2014. Responsible Minister was one of Cameron/Cleggs.
DPP from 2008 was Starmer 'who must have known'.... although the PO was deliberately excluding other prosecutors, and taking it's own action.
Boris Johnson sets up Inquiry, people in high places are severely bounced about...... CBE withdrawn?????
Looks good for BJ.
Its more like about 8% of the electorate. Concentrated in a few University constituencies.
The difference in India appears to be that they do not have the central organisation to enforce this rationing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-28014035
Not sure if we've heard of him since. Clearly not got very good judgement.
Every time the Pidcock tendency speak of Tory scum, vermin, 'Never kissed a Tory' blah blah they are showing contempt for the 2 or 3 million people whose support they need. Tories get this. Labour doesn't.
(I shall carry on voting Labour for Police Commissioner, local council and so on but they are way off persuading me to even think about them as a national government).
Leave took an overwhelming majority of seats, by not as high a margin. In FPTP terms it was much more efficient.
Chris Hanretty estimated that 63% (very close to two-thirds) of seats voted Leave.
https://fullfact.org/online/referendum-results-by-constituency/
It, along with the wider Wakefield district, voted leave massively. Interestingly, in the last local elections after decades of three Labour cllrs we voted in a Lib Dem - the general consensus was ‘we don’t like the Lib Dem stance on Europe but we’re sick of getting fuck all from Wakefield Council, so we’ll put in a Lib Dem, a locally born candidate, to shake it up a bit’. It looks like a Lib Dem will win this time round for similar reasons - the Labour candidate isn’t from here which won’t help Labour.
We’re also basically destined, it seems, to become a commuter town for Leeds. They’re chucking up houses here, which my opinion is no bad thing. Hopefully we will get some younger blood in from people priced out of Leeds, with benefits for the town economically and making it a bit less parochial and Leavery.
So I guess the point I’m lumbering towards is that although Labour is suffering currently in Leavery places, it probably won’t last for ever.
By country I meant United Kingdom. 100% of Scotland's constituencies from memory were Remain so strip them out and England is probably closer to three quarters Leave. Not seen England only figures.
If we don't appeal to working class communities across the country then we might as well pack up and go home.
Some might feel more comfortable hand wringing with the north London dinner party set, but we won't form a government by fixating on the pet causes of those who can stroll through life with nothing more to worry about than whether Waitrose will have a supply of Good Brie.
The issue we have now is that we wilfully ignore context if it offers us a chance to demonstrate our "right on" credentials.
That Dom didn't advocate border control to stop covid entering the UK a second time during last summer.
As to lockdowns, well we know that Dom followed them in a somewhat different manner than most people
It does depend upon ditching a few niche hobby horses though or, at least , not making them the centre of your platform and finding moderate solutions to advance them rather than dogmatic ones.
Didn't the CFR go up because the new variant is more deadly?
Then it came back down because of vaccines.
I don't think that's proof that people were denied care.
One of the smart things Johnson tends to do is delegate the hard work to others, while he provides the oomph and pizzazz. That's fine, though he has lost a lot of his team in the last two years. One of the curiosities of Operation Diss Dom is the allegation that Boris himself made the phone calls. Not a good idea, if true.
Perhaps it’s the Physics teacher bit of me speaking; words like weight, acceleration and battery cause enough problems due to their common usage being at odds with how they are used technically without adding to the list. If you mean “human” say it, don’t rely on “man” meaning the same thing or you might end up like the Witch-king of Angmar.
Especially when the Remain vote was piled disproportionately high in a few cities.
There's a few metropolitan constituencies that are very Remainy, then hundreds and hundreds more Leave.
I'm explaining what's required to go further.
The latter likely leading to the assassination of the military leadership by more enthusiastic junior ranks.
I think many of them have open minds on how best this can be addressed though. I focus on how Wokeism is more likely to hinder rather than help a peaceful and prosperous multi-racial society and the importance of nationhood in a stable world. I also challenge the need to go vegan on the science and evidence, and have interesting discussions on this.
There are several twenty-somethings at work who sometimes seek me out for my views on things like this, and I do find they listen and engage face to face (social media is a terrible thing) because I offer a different view.
True, they might secretly think I'm a wanker behind my back but we're still talking and in a democracy that's how you get to good solutions.
The key is not to try and win every vote in certain constituencies, it is to win the plurality of the vote in the majority of the constituencies.
Labour can afford to lose some Brighton and Cambridge votes to the Lib Dems or Greens if it means taking middle England voters off the Tories.
Thankfully they seem in no mood to learn that lesson. 😀
I could see natural organic sustainable meat being supplemented by synthetic real meat for the mass market, similarly to how industralised factories and feedstocks are now - just replacing them.
You'd get high quality sustainable herds for the former, preserving the gene pool and with very high animal welfare standards, whilst still making meat affordable for the masses on the latter.
I think that could work.
It's my most loathed term - and I am 100% sure I am not alone. It's not something that comes up in every day conversation, in fact I can't recall the last time I had a chat about the culture war. It just doesn't matter to anyone under the age of 40 on the ground.
There are certain extreme values that are beyond the pale. Once you get into the realms of hate you're typically there.
The Labour Party, like the BNP and other parties built on hatred don't deserve a majority. Let go of the hate and you may have a chance.
It’s not a defence of corruption, more a judgement of what effect it is likely to have on how and when we get a new PM.
It looks to me as though the PO was grossly negligent (just conceivably they didn't know the rules of disclosure, I suppose, but they should have taken legal advice on what they needed to do), while successive governments were simply ignorant of the details and vaguely thought it was some sort of messy private squabble. I was an MP when it all started and I do recall a disagreement between subpostmasters and the PO which seemed to relate to new technology, and I must admit I didn't pay much attention either, thinking it would no doubt be sorted out - I didn't know anyone was being prosecuted.
The underlying issue (at least according to the R4 programme) is that private prosecutions are regarded by everyone as less serious. Because they are in normal circumstances cases where the DPP has decided there isn't an adequate case and an individual sturbbornly pursues it anyway, the concept is devalued as "probably just some personal obsession". But where people actually get ruined or sent to prison, that's clearly completely unacceptable. I'm not sure that any government or party has deliberately ignored the issue but it certainly needs to be dealt with now.
The English language is full of words that mean different things in different contexts. In fact, arguably, context is everything.
As I have said time and time again, the majority of Labour members do not. It's the loud minority that should the loudest that make the headlines, despite the fact they no longer have any influence over the party, or its direction.
I really do not like it being implied that I somehow hate the UK, or the flag. I don't, I love this country. I just happen to think its best days are yet to come - there is always more to do.
You’re right of course that the Japanese didn’t intend to miss the aircraft carriers, but it was still a fairly significant blunder not to ascertain where they were before striking.
I am under 40 by the way.
I thank you.
I don't know about Keir. I've only heard him talk about it in the last 9 months. Put it this way: I'd need some serious convincing. For Attlee it was a sincere part of who he was throughout his life.
Don't put words in my mouth, you condescending prat.
Which reminds me uneasily of a possible risk that sanctions on Iran lead the hardliners to press ahead recklessly with the nuclear programme - "These sanctions are intolerable therefore we must be prepared to strike back" rather than the rational "These sanction are intolerable so we must change our behaviour to get them lifted".
I can't sit around and talk about topics so utterly pointless and irrelevant to the needs of 99% of the population, so I am off for a run. Bye bye
He fixed the DWP issue. He didn’t care whether it was a donor or not.
And the things associated with buzzing cities - new apartments, trendy craft beer bars, ethnic restaurants can now be found in abundance in the old industrial towns. The era of the only restaurant being a Berni Inn is long gone. Even in Hartlepool:
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurants-g191274-Hartlepool_County_Durham_England.html
The shopping streets may be struggling but they don't show the whole story.
By the end of his term Blair was often referenced, and to this day still is by some on here, as Bliar despite winning landslides.
It was based on the idea democracies were decadent, weak and divided. It probably had only a 10% chance of working.
Why did they try it? They were desperate. The US oil embargo was really crippling their economy and war effort in China, with no way out unless they stopped, and south-east Asia was so poorly defended it was simply too tempting an answer.
Cognitive dissonance did the rest.
We can talk once you've worked through that.
We can
Personally, if someone told me that their computer system doesn't have bugs, I'd just go away and find one. It doesn't usually take long.
Computer Weekly covered this from the beginning, and I've no idea how it was allowed to drag on like this and affect so many people.
The R4 series (The Great Post Office Trial) is truly shocking if you don't already know the story.
‘ Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show.’
We can talk when you are ready.
In an ocean-spanning conflict though, battleships are still extremely useful during amphibious operations, both in shore bombardment and in countering enemy naval attacks against the landing craft - though that only works with strong air support.
https://youtu.be/DrPNb_E9Y-Q
For me I think the underlying issues (in addition to injustice to individuals) are:
1 - Who can be a prosecution authority?
2 - Level playing field.
3 - Holding ALMOs to account via Parliament.
The full recent programmes. 1 hr each.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jhpl
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jpgt
Questions in the House started in 2009 (Brooks Newmark initially), and there are Ministers of allparties sloping shoulders.
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q="post+office+horizon"&p=3
Indeed there is a case in such situations to stop intensive care, in order to free up oxygen, medical and nursing care for ward patients whose prognosis is much better with relatively light interventions compared to ventilation. Obviously those then needing ICU will nearly all die, but ward patients will survive.
Credit is due to private eye.
A long read;
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/special_reports/justice-lost-in-the-post.pdf
On this very site we've got the likes of Roger and Kinabalu that hate their country and countrymen, hate the flag, find flying the flag to be obnoxious and would leave the Party if it were accepted or normal.
You are more moderate. But you need to make a choice, do you wish to align yourself with the likes of them, or the likes of Hartlepool and Red Wall voters.
If you want the likes of Red Wall voters to give you the time of day you need to disown those who openly despise them. You can't have both.
Nearly all of us are some sort of social democrat - and we are run by a social democrat government right now.
I think Labour can probably manage to bridge 2 but not 3. It’s not easy to resolve the problem and I’m not going to promise to have a magic solution for you 😁
That doesn’t, of course, mean that livestock farming will end any time soon, if ever. But the need for it, either nutritionally or for taste satisfaction, will greatly diminish.
The scope for synthetic biology is immense, and very large investments are being directed into the nascent industry. Early players like Ginkgo Bioworks (which got $1bn loan funding from the Trump administration to aid vaccine manufacturing) could become the next very big thing.
People in power can do as they please, break rules and not suffer consequences.
Is there anything we can do to help? It's absolutely awful. 😢
And they will not reform that because McCluskey would stop them (which llustrates the problem).
On 1, there can be a place for all of that as a set of views, but not atomised identity politics to the exclusion of all else.
On 2, I don't think that metrowoke (to coin a word) represents what they think it does.
As the rest of society continues to integrate without all the political aggro, they may find themselves on a sandcastle as the tide comes in. There's already a stark contrast between the single issue types who need division to maintian their powerbase, and the rest of the world.
A few thoughts:-
1. Prosecutions brought by private bodies do tend to lead to abuse of this type. The RSPCA has had similar complaints and when I was a government lawyers decades ago (I was at the time dealing with wildlife matters, amongst others) they had a terrible reputation for being over-zealous and paying no regard to the law.
2. The Post Office did have ministerial oversight of a type so when this started being an issue, Ministers should have got more involved.
3. Judges are there to ensure that trials - whether they're brought privately or by the CPS - are handled in accordance with the rules. It's not clear to me whether there has been any judicial failing here.
4. My best guess is that the failure was mainly that of the Post Office who failed to carry out any sort of proper investigation and deliberately or negligently did not disclose the information they knew about the problems with their Horizon system. Fujitsu will also have been at fault. If the information is not disclosed and people lie about what they know, it becomes very hard indeed for defence counsel to do the investigative work needed to show that the prosecution is fundamentally misconceived.
5. The lawyers for the Post Office who did the prosecution also need scrutinising. They know the criminal disclosure rules. The argument that it is a private prosecution and therefore they don't need to worry about this really does not wash. Every solicitor, every barrister has an overriding duty not to mislead the court. If they failed in that duty they should be held to account.
6. Far too many people and institutions have a blind faith in technology and technological solutions, in the belief that because IT is is involved, because it comes from a computer it must be right. Anyone with any real knowledge of technology and the combination of it and human behaviour knows that this is nonsense. It is something which all those - on this forum and elsewhere - advocating technological solutions to some issue or other should bear in mind.
This was a case of a badly flawed system and an arrogant cowardly institution which put its own interests first. But more importantly, it was a case - as all such cases are - of humans making mistakes, lying and covering up, of people doing the wrong thing and of others failing to do the right thing. All involved should feel thoroughly ashamed of their part in this affair. And some of them should face legal consequences for their misbehaviour.
Interesting that this is breaking down, with people from indian and west african origins now floating towards the Conservatives a bit more. Maybe because it appears a bit like they dont hate their very existence as much anymore.
The bile towards "racial gatekeepers" and others, it's like the bile towards nationalists.
It takes a while for people to clock on that you hate them sometimes, but when they do, the turning can be brutal.
You need to make the case that it is better to introduce a bit of near term uncertainty to accelerate lockdown as well as making the case in the numbers. The risk, of course, is that there is a lot of uncertainty and if things go wrong the government will be blamed for the acceleration regardless of whether it is their fault or not.
If I was cynical I could see an announcement on, say, May 1 that the government’s policies have been so effective that they will accelerate the lifting of restrictions as of May 17.