While we are all busy writing the obituaries for Labour, I would be fascinated to see the comment thread following the 2005 Tory GE election defeat (did PB exist then - are the threads archived anywhere?).
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
Could just be another age marker. If you are currently in your 60s, a fair chunk of your cohort left school with no qualifications, because they didn't stay at school long enough to get them. Leave school now, and it's pretty much unthinkable.
And it's not "somewheres are thick". If anything, it's the other way round- people move around for HE and the sort of jobs that only happen in big cities, and that forces a degree of rootless cosmopolitanism on them.
Which is the difference between an economic drift right with age, and one based on values. There are goodish reasons to expect the first, but not the second.
All very true.
There's also the fact that fewer qualifications tends to imply different kinds of jobs and different kinds of problems, which might be better addressed - in perception or indeed in reality* - by the Conservatives rather than Labour.
*It's a dearly held truth among many on the left that the Conservatives are just doing a better job of selling themselves to e.g. the red wall than Labour are doing. Few seem to consider the possibility that the Conservatives actually have more to offer those places, too. Similar to the mistakes made by Labour during the Thatcher years (not in the red wall at that point, but in the other places that were voting Tory for the first time).
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
Two problems with this thesis: Firstly it is not cynical for any political party to try to get any voters to vote for them. That's their big job. Either all parties are cynical in this way or none are.
Secondly Walton, Bootle and Knowsley don't seem particularly under Boris's spell but don't have conspicuously high levels of HFE and PhDs either. It's much more complicated than that.
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
The Deaths Head was in fact appropriated by the Nazis.
Unless Fredrick the Great was a Nazi. In 1808.
Or Calico Jack was a Nazi. In 1718.
Or the 17th Lancers, of the British Army. in 1759.
Pidcock on the BBC, demonstrating the intellectual heft of the Labour left. Phrases like 'working class experience is full of fear', and 'we need to remind people that Tories are conservatives, their policies are conservative'. Christ, just when I was beginning to question if I had it right, and maybe the country does want something to the left of Starmer she has managed to convince me that, even if the Country might not want Starmer (not a certainty, mind) there is no way broad swathes of the country want her kind. Yuck!
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
I think this country had tremendous success in becoming socially more progressive in the last 20 years and by and large brought people along with it (yes there are always people dragging their knuckles but that happens in any society). I think it shows that people are willing to be educated and become more enlightened on social topics - in my experience people generally aren’t horrible and like to help and understand others.
Personally I think the objections to the woke narrative in the past few years has less to do with the actual principles that people are espousing, it’s more to do with the way these things are presented as if people need to self-flagellate or atone for their behaviours. It’s much easier to get people to get on board with things if you’re not implicitly or explicitly going on the attack about their “privilege”.
See Labour's / media react to that race report.....its a white wash, there is widespread institutional racism, its everywhere, we are bad as America...
Most normal folk, no we aren't...and for many, by inference you are accusing me of being a racist again like Brexit.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
I think this country had tremendous success in becoming socially more progressive in the last 20 years and by and large brought people along with it (yes there are always people dragging their knuckles but that happens in any society). I think it shows that people are willing to be educated and become more enlightened on social topics - in my experience people generally aren’t horrible and like to help and understand others.
Personally I think the objections to the woke narrative in the past few years has less to do with the actual principles that people are espousing, it’s more to do with the way these things are presented as if people need to self-flagellate or atone for their behaviours. It’s much easier to get people to get on board with things if you’re not implicitly or explicitly going on the attack about their “privilege”.
Yes. Blair tended to get it right, and actually so did Cameron on gay marriage. Their approach was “we all think this now and well done us for making these changes together - isn’t Britain great” rather than “you need to move with the times you privileged, racist, homophobic bastards”.
In honour of the glorious win in our new heartland of Hartlepool, I’ve had a go at immortalizing the political moment epigrammatically in the traditional manner of the old: with an elegiac couplet or two. Ahem:
INSTAR MERITUM:
principis aurata muros candescere charta ______ingemis, et quanti quis dederitque rogas. heu, tibi quid paries, partes cum sede repulsae? ______aurea dum spectas, moenia rubra cadunt.
A WELL-EARNED IMAGE:
‘The PM’s walls in Number 10 gleam bright with gilded leaf!’ _____you wail, and quiz ‘How much, and who’s been doling?’ Alas, what good’s a party-wall when your party’s lost its seat? _____While it’s at walls of gold you gape, the Red Wall keeps on falling.
It's good but why the translation? Why assume posters on here are unable to grasp the original ancient greek?
The contempt for the audience is palpable and will lose you much affection and respect.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
While we are all busy writing the obituaries for Labour, I would be fascinated to see the comment thread following the 2005 Tory GE election defeat (did PB exist then - are the threads archived anywhere?).
Nah, must be a from different site. It's full of betting posts
Interesting though... I suggest LD supporters immerse themselves for a bit of feelgood time.
Also, liked this "The disappointment for the Tories is that, although London moved back to them in a big way, the rest of the country didn’t follow suit." How things change, huh?
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
The Deaths Head was in fact appropriated by the Nazis.
Unless Fredrick the Great was a Nazi. In 1808.
Or Calico Jack was a Nazi. In 1718.
Or the 17th Lancers, of the British Army. in 1759.
Thank you.
I think anyone who knows me on this site would know I was going for Pirates not Nazis. ☠️
Children's playgrounds can have skulls in them with pirate ships. The notion that people see that and think Nazis ... I think Nigel is seeing what he wants to see. 😕
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
Indeed. I think part of the challenge for those of us who recognise the benefits of diversity is that it is made harder as a message by people on the woke extreme. That said, today's "PC gone mad" may well be seen by future generations as perfectly normal. Look how perceptions have changed with respect to gay people.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Strange announcement by the plod, that picture is clearly from something like a profile pic from social media account rather than a CCTV, so presumption must be they have a name, but aren't saying.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
I think this country had tremendous success in becoming socially more progressive in the last 20 years and by and large brought people along with it (yes there are always people dragging their knuckles but that happens in any society). I think it shows that people are willing to be educated and become more enlightened on social topics - in my experience people generally aren’t horrible and like to help and understand others.
Personally I think the objections to the woke narrative in the past few years has less to do with the actual principles that people are espousing, it’s more to do with the way these things are presented as if people need to self-flagellate or atone for their behaviours. It’s much easier to get people to get on board with things if you’re not implicitly or explicitly going on the attack about their “privilege”.
Yes. Blair tended to get it right, and actually so did Cameron on gay marriage. Their approach was “we all think this now and well done us for making these changes together - isn’t Britain great” rather than “you need to move with the times you privileged, racist, homophobic bastards”.
A major issue is differential rules/enforcement - people aren't impressed by "You can be fired for X. He can do X because of his membership of group Y"
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Which is fine but it doesn't solve Labours problem - which is they are losing 100s of seats up North while gaining a few 10s of seats further South.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Yes, really strong evidence of that from Basildon and Harlow.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Dishy Rishi waves....
Hence the interesting attempt to re-classify Hindus as "not a proper minority".
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
The Deaths Head was in fact appropriated by the Nazis.
Unless Fredrick the Great was a Nazi. In 1808.
Or Calico Jack was a Nazi. In 1718.
Or the 17th Lancers, of the British Army. in 1759.
Thank you.
I think anyone who knows me on this site would know I was going for Pirates not Nazis. ☠️
Children's playgrounds can have skulls in them with pirate ships. The notion that people see that and think Nazis ... I think Nigel is seeing what he wants to see. 😕
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
The Deaths Head was in fact appropriated by the Nazis.
Unless Fredrick the Great was a Nazi. In 1808.
Or Calico Jack was a Nazi. In 1718.
Or the 17th Lancers, of the British Army. in 1759.
Thank you.
I think anyone who knows me on this site would know I was going for Pirates not Nazis. ☠️
Children's playgrounds can have skulls in them with pirate ships. The notion that people see that and think Nazis ... I think Nigel is seeing what he wants to see. 😕
You keep it then mate. If you don't think symbols and their associations matter then more fool you. I think combined with your often very right wing views many might make the connection I did.
However, to be fair, I do think the children's playground for you is very apt.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Dishy Rishi waves....
Hence the interesting attempt to re-classify Hindus as "not a proper minority".
Not just that, but that the likes of Badenoch, Patel, Javid aren't proper member of BAME... something something rich, wrong opinions for a BAME....
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
In honour of the glorious win in our new heartland of Hartlepool, I’ve had a go at immortalizing the political moment epigrammatically in the traditional manner of the old: with an elegiac couplet or two. Ahem:
INSTAR MERITUM:
principis aurata muros candescere charta ______ingemis, et quanti quis dederitque rogas. heu, tibi quid paries, partes cum sede repulsae? ______aurea dum spectas, moenia rubra cadunt.
A WELL-EARNED IMAGE:
‘The PM’s walls in Number 10 gleam bright with gilded leaf!’ _____you wail, and quiz ‘How much, and who’s been doling?’ Alas, what good’s a party-wall when your party’s lost its seat? _____While it’s at walls of gold you gape, the Red Wall keeps on falling.
It's good but why the translation? Why assume posters on here are unable to grasp the original ancient greek?
The contempt for the audience is palpable and will lose you much affection and respect.
Beautiful ambiguous comment for the non-linguists
☺ - Don't want him getting too big for his boots. Things are grim enough as they are.
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
No way is that close. If that is close then there is not going to be an IndyRef2. 😕
After the hyper politics of the last seven, if not fourteen years what are we going to be discussing in the next couple if there's no Brexit and no IndyRef2 to debate?
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
No way is that close. If that is close then there is not going to be an IndyRef2. 😕
After the hyper politics of the last seven, if not fourteen years what are we going to be discussing in the next couple if there's no Brexit and no IndyRef2 to debate?
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Dishy Rishi waves....
Or Ms Patel.
Ms Patel has something from the night about her in a way Rishi simply doesn't.
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
No way is that close. If that is close then there is not going to be an IndyRef2. 😕
After the hyper politics of the last seven, if not fourteen years what are we going to be discussing in the next couple if there's no Brexit and no IndyRef2 to debate?
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to object to opposing the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Dishy Rishi waves....
Or Ms Patel.
Ms Patel has something from the night about her in a way Rishi simply doesn't.
Hmm, as Miss Widdicombe said of Michael Howard? That's a point. I can't see her doing a jolly Johnsonian (or Davidsonian) photo opp. Though some PBers seem rather partial to her chances.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Educated middle class mainly white voters move out from London and the Labour vote there is maintained by the growing Asian populations into which the Tories have never made much progress.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
Dishy Rishi waves....
Or Ms Patel.
Ms Patel has something from the night about her in a way Rishi simply doesn't.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Which is fine but it doesn't solve Labours problem - which is they are losing 100s of seats up North while gaining a few 10s of seats further South.
Agree. This issue really needs a lot of attention. As a non expert it seems to me that there are far more 'ordinary people' seats than suburban/rural seats that could go Labour under the London/urban influence.
Accepting that Labour are impregnable in super urban, BAME and posh Guardianista seats (all mixtures thereof of course), which, axiomatically cannot be more than the about 200 they currently hold, are there enough 'Labour realignment' seats to get close to a majority? I don't think there are enough in their top 100 target seats, which include few in the London overspill area.
And, crucially, judging from their demeanour this morning, I don't think Labour think that their realignment plan to win Hertfordshire and Surrey and Oxfordshire etc will be enough. They sound like a party whose centrist policies have been nicked, whose leftish policies have been rejected and who don't have an election strategy.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
There's no doubt the stench of some unpleasant right wing views hangs around Thommo like the smell of incinerated grease outside the worst fucking kebab shop in Hartlepool but it's not because of the crâne et os mantled with the flag of the Genoese Navy.
Latest from Sir John Curtice: In places last contested in 2016, there is a swing of 10 points from Labour to Tory in places where relatively large numbers of people have no qualifications, whereas there is a slight swing to Labour in places with a large number of graduates.
Interesting. I know it is a non-PC thing to say but it infers susceptibility to Boris Johnson's message is proportionate to the lack of education of the overall electorate. Combine this with the more educated folk that would never vote Labour (particularly the more prosperous) and it is a cynical but winning formula.
The big tell for me is London.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
Which is fine but it doesn't solve Labours problem - which is they are losing 100s of seats up North while gaining a few 10s of seats further South.
Agree. This issue really needs a lot of attention. As a non expert it seems to me that there are far more 'ordinary people' seats than suburban/rural seats that could go Labour under the London/urban influence.
Accepting that Labour are impregnable in super urban, BAME and posh Guardianista seats (all mixtures thereof of course), which, axiomatically cannot be more than the about 200 they currently hold, are there enough 'Labour realignment' seats to get close to a majority? I don't think there are enough in their top 100 target seats, which include few in the London overspill area.
And, crucially, judging from their demeanour this morning, I don't think Labour think that their realignment plan to win Hertfordshire and Surrey and Oxfordshire etc will be enough. They sound like a party whose centrist policies have been nicked, whose leftish policies have been rejected and who don't have an election strategy.
The election strategy, at this moment, simply has to be to wait until the Tories start pissing people off, which will happen eventually.
You can't win against a platform that promises all things to all people and has the money tap gushing.
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
The swastika was also appropriated by the Nazis. Perhaps he could use that motif too then?
Which one?
My wife was a bit startled when some new neighbours painted this on their door step -
Indeed, you are making the point for me. I am not sure that even that version might be sensible for a right wing poster to have as their motif. Or perhaps you disagree?
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
The swastika was also appropriated by the Nazis. Perhaps he could use that motif too then?
The swastika wasn't used in our culture before the Nazi's appropriated it. As explained to you, the skull and crossbones was, and continues, to be used completely separately to any Nazi affiliation. Unless of course you're currently upset by marauding Nazi pirates on the high-seas.
The Nazi's used all sorts of emblems and imagery. Presumably the U.S.A. should cease using any eagle motif? Or the current day Luftwaffe should cease using the Iron Cross emblem? Perhaps Mercedes and BMW should re-brand - after all their insignia was adorned on Nazi-used kit.
While we are all busy writing the obituaries for Labour, I would be fascinated to see the comment thread following the 2005 Tory GE election defeat (did PB exist then - are the threads archived anywhere?).
The rest of the month's headers don't display much in the way of political obituaries (other than Michael Howard's)...
WOULD CHOOSING CLARKE BE THE TORIES’ “CLAUSE 4” MOMENT?
YOUGOV: UK OPPOSITION TO EU CONSTITUTION GROWING
COULD THIS MAN BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?
WILL DAVID DAVIS BE REWARDED FOR HIS FORBEARANCE IN 2003?
Strange announcement by the plod, that picture is clearly from something like a profile pic from social media account rather than a CCTV, so presumption must be they have a name, but aren't saying.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
Joseph Anderson @janderson_news · 11m EDINBURGH CENTRAL - Tories not confident of taking seat, SNP’s Angus Robertson looking like the frontrunner to retake it #ScottishElection2021
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
No way is that close. If that is close then there is not going to be an IndyRef2. 😕
After the hyper politics of the last seven, if not fourteen years what are we going to be discussing in the next couple if there's no Brexit and no IndyRef2 to debate?
We're all going to be out and about enjoying ourselves after lockdown. Sorry Mike.
Peter Davidson @Peter_Davidson1 · 32m Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
Joseph Anderson @janderson_news · 11m EDINBURGH CENTRAL - Tories not confident of taking seat, SNP’s Angus Robertson looking like the frontrunner to retake it #ScottishElection2021
If SCons took Ed Central then that's the SNP fucked.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
Do a) while doing b)
Yes, and I think that's ridiculous.
X wishes to oppose the killing of black men by US cops in way Y.
Z mocks X for opposing the killing of black men by US cops in way Y because of "culture war reasons".
While we are all busy writing the obituaries for Labour, I would be fascinated to see the comment thread following the 2005 Tory GE election defeat (did PB exist then - are the threads archived anywhere?).
COULD THIS MAN BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?
Was that a certain B Obama? I seem to remember people mentioning him once.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
The swastika was also appropriated by the Nazis. Perhaps he could use that motif too then?
Which one?
My wife was a bit startled when some new neighbours painted this on their door step -
Indeed, you are making the point for me. I am not sure that even that version might be sensible for a right wing poster to have as their motif. Or perhaps you disagree?
You might find that trying to associate that version of the swastika with the Nazis would land you in a place of wo(k)e
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
Starmer did "just b"
Or certainly thats the bit people remember
Yeah exactly. So what?
Mocking Starmer for doing (b) makes you look petty and ridiculous.
Agree. This issue really needs a lot of attention. As a non expert it seems to me that there are far more 'ordinary people' seats than suburban/rural seats that could go Labour under the London/urban influence.
Accepting that Labour are impregnable in super urban, BAME and posh Guardianista seats (all mixtures thereof of course), which, axiomatically cannot be more than the about 200 they currently hold, are there enough 'Labour realignment' seats to get close to a majority? I don't think there are enough in their top 100 target seats, which include few in the London overspill area.
And, crucially, judging from their demeanour this morning, I don't think Labour think that their realignment plan to win Hertfordshire and Surrey and Oxfordshire etc will be enough. They sound like a party whose centrist policies have been nicked, whose leftish policies have been rejected and who don't have an election strategy.
Calling it a plan is crediting Labour with foresight that it doesn't have. It's a demographic change which is unwittingly helping them. Basically I'd agree with you: they don't have an election strategy and they don't have any distinctive policies.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to object to opposing the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
I never said that. I said taking the knee is not necessary. You can say its not acceptable without taking the knee.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to oppose the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
indeed but is the best response:
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
They are both good responses. However you can do (a) without pissing on (b).
Starmer did "just b"
Or certainly thats the bit people remember
Yeah exactly. So what?
Mocking Starmer for doing (b) makes you look petty and ridiculous.
I'm not running for office - the voters have seen SKS is all hat and no cattle.
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to object to opposing the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
I never said that. I said taking the knee is not necessary. You can say its not acceptable without taking the knee.
Of course you can say it's not acceptable without taking the knee.
Likewise, people should be allowed to take the knee in opposition without being mocked. It's ridiculously petty. Who cares?
So Labour lefties think that the reason they lost Hartlepool was because they weren't loony lefty enough? And the response to the huge defeat there is to double down on Corbyn policies? If that is the case they are deluded beyond belief. Sorry, Jezziah, but your diagnosis is so, so wrong.
In trying to hold both the metro elite and the working class Labour vote together SKS has an impossible task: you can't take the knee wrapped in the Union flag and please both constituencies; you end up alienating both of them. He needs to choose, as Casino mentioned upthread.
Despite people on the left of centre deriding the "culture war" as non-existent, to me it is very real. I was amazed by last evening's discussion on here that so many people had never experienced the impact of wokeness as work. I work for a large US (East Coast) global corporation and our senior management and HR are obsessed by it - our cooperate intranet is like the BBC home page with article after article on E, D & I. Maybe smaller UK firms have yet to be afflicted by it but if anyone has access to the CIPD magazine you will get an idea what is coming in terms of UK HR - the CIPD has bought into the woke agenda hook, line and sinker.
This stuff is not going away. The people of Hartlepool may not be exposed to it in the workplace (yet) but they can see the way it is affecting popular culture and they don't like it.
For now, the Conservatives have parked their tanks on Labour's lawn when it comes to government spending and Boris is seen as standing up for traditional British values. Labour's only response to government spending is to spend more, which lacks credibility, and it appears to be actively against traditional British values.
So what does Labour do? Is the plan to sit and wait for the Tories to implode (most likely when the COVID spending chickens come home to roost), keep the fragile coalition together and hope that by that time demographics have worked in its favour? It might work but it doesn't really address the fundamental issue of where it stands on the British values question.
Blair won for a reason; when the time came, mainstream Britain was not repelled by Labour. It is now.
I have worked in HR for many years. I am instinctively right of centre politically. Sorry to break it to you, but diversity and inclusion is not about "wokeness", it is about the fact that it has been clearly proven that diverse teams are more innovative, and paradoxically perhaps, more cohesive. Maintaining the team profiles (particularly senior ones) of yesteryear that were dominated by middle aged white men is not in any organisations' interest. Most companies are recognising this, though it is a difficult challenge to address without "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" (as it is called in the US) which is illegal in this country. One of the ways to challenge it is to promote literature and documentation that promotes the change. Hope that helps!
Excellent post, Nigel. There are valid concerns about woke but my strong sense of the more ardent antiwokerati is they are a motley mix of the plain ignorant and those more knowing who are eminently comfortable with the old hierarchies and affronted by them being challenged.
It's a definition problem. The right of centre defines "woke" as over-obsession with D&I to the exclusion of almost everything else. Whether this is the intended usage by its proponents is a separate question, but hopefully it is clear that, based on the definition above, wokeness is necessarily bad.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
Only one out of Starmer and Boris published a photo of them taking the knee in their office.
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
I still think Raab looks ridiculous to be honest
Well I do not. There is too much woke shite and it needs standing up to......
I personally think it's ridiculous to object to opposing the killing of black men by US cops purely for "culture war" reasons, but hey, justify it however you like. "Woke shite" indeed.
I never said that. I said taking the knee is not necessary. You can say its not acceptable without taking the knee.
Of course it is not necessary. Equally it is not necessary to not take the knee.
I quite like Starmer, but something has to change.
I MAY need to change my Avatar before the weekend...
Or you're going to have to design Starmer one of your Corbyn style bar charts.
You might want to change yours Philip. You often claim not to be of the extreme right, but your avatar looks like something Tommy Robinson might have as a tattoo!
I don't have any tattoos but if you think that it says more about you than it does me. When I changed it many people here across the political spectrum said they liked it.
I thought I was being nice to you there Philip! OK, so in more detail, historically skulls are associated with the far right. The Nazis referred to them as "Totenkopf" (think I have spelt that correctly) or "death's head", and it was most notably used as insignia for the SS. It is also favoured by white supremacists. Skinheads often use skulls as "cool" insignia and I think they are also used by Combat 18. Obviously if you are comfortable with those associations....
Bloody far right pirates. Totenkopf isn't the sole preserve of the far right, nor Nazi's. Unless the No. 100 RAF Squadron isn't telling us something.
The swastika was also appropriated by the Nazis. Perhaps he could use that motif too then?
The swastika wasn't used in our culture before the Nazi's appropriated it. As explained to you, the skull and crossbones was, and continues, to be used completely separately to any Nazi affiliation. Unless of course you're currently upset by marauding Nazi pirates on the high-seas.
The Nazi's used all sorts of emblems and imagery. Presumably the U.S.A. should cease using any eagle motif? Or the current day Luftwaffe should cease using the Iron Cross emblem? Perhaps Mercedes and BMW should re-brand - after all their insignia was adorned on Nazi-used kit.
You are being silly. I was referring to Philip's use of a skull adorned with a flag of St George, which I could well imagine would be loved by Tommy Robinson. Although I was partly taking the piss, I thought it might make him pause for thought and that it might do him a favour. If he is happy that might be misinterpreted (or maybe indeed not) that is clearly up to him.
Comments
There's also the fact that fewer qualifications tends to imply different kinds of jobs and different kinds of problems, which might be better addressed - in perception or indeed in reality* - by the Conservatives rather than Labour.
*It's a dearly held truth among many on the left that the Conservatives are just doing a better job of selling themselves to e.g. the red wall than Labour are doing. Few seem to consider the possibility that the Conservatives actually have more to offer those places, too. Similar to the mistakes made by Labour during the Thatcher years (not in the red wall at that point, but in the other places that were voting Tory for the first time).
Unless Fredrick the Great was a Nazi. In 1808.
Or Calico Jack was a Nazi. In 1718.
Or the 17th Lancers, of the British Army. in 1759.
Most normal folk, no we aren't...and for many, by inference you are accusing me of being a racist again like Brexit.
I'm totally bought into the principles of inclusivity (indeed, how can anyone reasonably object?) but current corporate attitudes go way beyond what can possibly be considered reasonable. And it's impossible to tell how many people secretly dislike it because everyone's terrified of being branded a bigot and having their career severely limited as a result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totenkopf#:~:text=The Italian elite storm-troopers,death's head emblem in 1917.
People talk about London being a near-impregnable Labour fortress, an island whose voting behaviour doesn't influence anywhere else. As if everyone who works in London, lives in London, stays in London, has no family or friends outside London.
This is self-evidently bollocks.
What is really apparent round here is that it's the places with the closest ties to London that are moving away from the Tories. Put simply, people move out from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to the villages - or directly from London to the villages. But they don't start voting Tory now that they own a house in the country. They vote Labour, LibDem or Green, just as they would have done in London.
And that's only increasing. The massive new estates round here are essentially Oxford overspill. They are not going to be full of Tory voters.
Yes, we are seeing a massive realignment at the moment, but it's not just a one-way movement of the supposed Red Wall from Labour to Conservative, and I think we'll see more signs of that over the weekend.
We just won the Epping and Theydon Bois marginal seat by 300 votes over the LDs and the rural seats and Waltham Abbey by miles
When Raab said he wouldn't he was "ridiculed"
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-raab-take-knee-game-thrones-black-lives-matter-a9573141.html
"Dominic Raab ridiculed for claiming taking a knee comes from Game of Thrones
Foreign secretary says he only kneels for ‘the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me’"
Who looks ridiculous this morning ? Not Raab.
Interesting though... I suggest LD supporters immerse themselves for a bit of feelgood time.
Also, liked this "The disappointment for the Tories is that, although London moved back to them in a big way, the rest of the country didn’t follow suit." How things change, huh?
I think anyone who knows me on this site would know I was going for Pirates not Nazis. ☠️
Children's playgrounds can have skulls in them with pirate ships. The notion that people see that and think Nazis ... I think Nigel is seeing what he wants to see. 😕
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-57023743
Strange announcement by the plod, that picture is clearly from something like a profile pic from social media account rather than a CCTV, so presumption must be they have a name, but aren't saying.
The next strategic step from clever Tories would be to replace the clown with an asprational BAME leader, before Labour even gets to moving on from middle aged men. That could shatter another piece of red wall.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/56884817
Nazis under the... khazis?
However, to be fair, I do think the children's playground for you is very apt.
Peter Davidson
@Peter_Davidson1
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32m
Scots Tory sources saying Banffshire and Buchan Coast could be "quite close". The SNP have a 6,683 majority in the seat.
Karen Adam (SNP) up against Mark Findlater (Tory).
After the hyper politics of the last seven, if not fourteen years what are we going to be discussing in the next couple if there's no Brexit and no IndyRef2 to debate?
My wife was a bit startled when some new neighbours painted this on their door step -
a) Make a speech condemning the act and suggesting policies to enhance policing in the Uk
b) Take a picture in your own office doing an air guitar version of Colin Kaepernick ..
Accepting that Labour are impregnable in super urban, BAME and posh Guardianista seats (all mixtures thereof of course), which, axiomatically cannot be more than the about 200 they currently hold, are there enough 'Labour realignment' seats to get close to a majority? I don't think there are enough in their top 100 target seats, which include few in the London overspill area.
And, crucially, judging from their demeanour this morning, I don't think Labour think that their realignment plan to win Hertfordshire and Surrey and Oxfordshire etc will be enough. They sound like a party whose centrist policies have been nicked, whose leftish policies have been rejected and who don't have an election strategy.
Buy turnip futures.
You can't win against a platform that promises all things to all people and has the money tap gushing.
The Nazi's used all sorts of emblems and imagery. Presumably the U.S.A. should cease using any eagle motif? Or the current day Luftwaffe should cease using the Iron Cross emblem? Perhaps Mercedes and BMW should re-brand - after all their insignia was adorned on Nazi-used kit.
WOULD CHOOSING CLARKE BE THE TORIES’ “CLAUSE 4” MOMENT?
YOUGOV: UK OPPOSITION TO EU CONSTITUTION GROWING
COULD THIS MAN BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?
WILL DAVID DAVIS BE REWARDED FOR HIS FORBEARANCE IN 2003?
WHEN WILL TONY BLAIR GO?
2011 Scot Parl: 50.5 - 45.4
2014 Euros: 33.5 - 29.0
2014 Indy ref: 84.6 - 44.7
2015 West: 71.1 - 50
2016 Scot Parl: 55.6 - 46.5
2017 West: 66.4 - 36.9
2019 Euro: 39.9 - 37.8
2019 West: 68.1 - 45
Plotted as a graph it looks like
Turnout on the bottom, votes share on the left
Joseph Anderson
@janderson_news
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11m
EDINBURGH CENTRAL - Tories not confident of taking seat, SNP’s Angus Robertson looking like the frontrunner to retake it #ScottishElection2021
I don’t remember them asking why men weren’t prioritised for the vaccine to begin with.
C'mon. Need details..
X wishes to oppose the killing of black men by US cops in way Y.
Z mocks X for opposing the killing of black men by US cops in way Y because of "culture war reasons".
Z is an imbecile.
https://twitter.com/paulhutcheon/status/1390621413984411649
Or certainly thats the bit people remember
BBC poor, obvs. I've tried London Mayor "live results" but the feed has nothing and keeps crashing.
Mocking Starmer for doing (b) makes you look petty and ridiculous.
Another nail in the Union coffin...
Likewise, people should be allowed to take the knee in opposition without being mocked. It's ridiculously petty. Who cares?
https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/live-results/live-mayoral-results