Lord Adonis says that Keir Starmer is not an election winner
"I supported Keir to replace Jeremy. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a transitional figure - a nice man... without political skills or antennae at the highest level"
Lib Dems coming in quite a bit ahead of the polls. Tories doing very well in the North, but a bit Ho Hum in the South. Several big surprises in Scotland on the cards now.
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.
Indeed. One or two PBers made a few coppers on that election.
Sorry but you want planning at a local area otherwise you have councillors with no knowledge of an area voting schemes through because they need to be seen to approve something and that scheme doesn't impact them.
As one example the destruction of Bishop Auckland Town Centre by the opening of an out of town centre went through even though every local councillor knew what the consequences would be and voted against it.
You can still have that with a unitary. Our district is already split up into two smaller planning committees (Uplands and Lowlands). No reason why that couldn't continue.
Except that it is rare to find either Tory majority or Labour majority councils that believe in that sort of thing. Both of them would rather keep things under central control in the town hall.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
It's also quite a "Labour" policy isn't it, forcing everyone onto the lowest common denominator? I thought Tories were in support of local councils doing their own thing and innovation?
Yep absolutely. I can see a case for highlighting the best schemes and supporting other councils in achieving those results but imposing a centralised single tier solution on every council just goes against everything the Tories claim to stand for.
Set standards and support councils in reaching them. Don't impose systems from above.
Lord Adonis says that Keir Starmer is not an election winner
"I supported Keir to replace Jeremy. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a transitional figure - a nice man... without political skills or antennae at the highest level"
To me it looks like there are signs of the Tories going backwards in the South - but they will be more than happy that with the extraordinary results in the North.
As for Labour and the Lib Dems, it is time to sort out an unofficial pact in the South to do damage down there. To show signs of possible progress in 2024 and where the Tory majority can eventually be removed. This will however take years.
The problem with a pact is that Lib Dems can attract Tory voters much more than Lab can in most places in the South. Take JRM's seat; Lab are always second, but they will never win it, whereas LDs could and I can't see Lab giving up a whole lot of places where they are in 2nd place.
Lots of LD votes in the South will be Tory if the choice is Lab or 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 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.
I'm failing to see your point here.
The point is the voters remembered the empty gesture and noted that SKS had nothing else to offer other than wishing to be seen signalling but not contributing.
You're scraping the barrel here.
SKS voicing his opposition by "taking the knee" has the same effectiveness of Raab voicing his opposition without taking the knee — i.e. none. It's simply a show of support.
Whether or not SKS is any good is another question, but him "taking the knee" has nothing to do with it.
It's the iconic moment of his tenure so far. The bacon sandwich memory.
Ifs what happens if you don't take the knee that is the problem. If you don't you are attacked..
Really? Did Sturgeon take the knee? Did Davey? I have no idea but doubt they did and doubt even more that they get attacked for not taking it?
Whereas every week people on here will moan about those taking the knee. You have it the wrong way around.
but if they were to be asked and decided not to, that's when the attacks would start. If you are not with us you are against us.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
Tetrapaks are an enormous pain to recycle I’ve read - to the point that the profitability of a recycling service is dominated by the proportion of Tetrapaks in the waste stream (if I recall the article in question correctly).
I can believe that Tetrapak has it's own recycling site http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/ and I have to continually remind my wife that sadly they need to go into the rubbish bin.,
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
Tetrapaks are an enormous pain to recycle I’ve read - to the point that the profitability of a recycling service is dominated by the proportion of Tetrapaks in the waste stream (if I recall the article in question correctly).
Tetrapaks and pizza boxes. Same with those plastic-lined cardboard things that supermarket salad bars now give you instead of straight plastic boxes, failing to realise that they’re a nightmare to recycle, even if they look ‘green’.
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.
I hear so much genuine anger that different areas do this differently. This is an anger I simply can't understand. It's the work of minutes to understand your own area's recycling system. Still, the government appears to be responding to a genuine demand here.
The concern of course must be that this might result in a poorer service in some areas that currently have very good recycling systems.
Currently Lincolnshire has a brilliant system. They have a single bin which takes just about everything that can possibly be recycled and then it is sorted by the private contractor (Mountain in our area). This makes recycling quick, easy and efficient and you really see a difference with very little going into the landfill bin.
Across the border in Nottinghamshire they also have a single bin system but what you can recycle is severely limited. So no glass for example. Or tetrapacks. This means that my Mum saves all this stuff up and gives it to me to put in my recycling bin each time I see her.
So if the rationalising means Lincolnshire end up with the Nottinghamshire system then that would be a very retrograde step.
It's also quite a "Labour" policy isn't it, forcing everyone onto the lowest common denominator? I thought Tories were in support of local councils doing their own thing and innovation?
Yep absolutely. I can see a case for highlighting the best schemes and supporting other councils in achieving those results but imposing a centralised single tier solution on every council just goes against everything the Tories claim to stand for.
Set standards and support councils in reaching them. Don't impose systems from above.
Imposing a single solution from Whitehall is against everything the Conservatives stood for. But that was under previous management.
If it is a replay of 2016 then that is a huge Unionist surge.
But maybe Unionist surge is tapped out and it is nationalists on top.
No one knows.
I don´t know either, but some how this doesnt feel that good for the SNP. I guess the first result will be up pretty soon, but Clydebank might not be typical of the central belt, let alone Scotland as a whole, so could be a while before we see a pattern.
@josh_wingrove Biden touts his Buy American plans: "Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers."
“America first”, one could say. No new WTO trade round for some years...
A key belief on the left of the Democratic party is that international trade deals - especially NAFTA - paved the way for Trump, by selling out the skilled working class/lower middle class.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
Latest rumours are 50/50 Lab/Con in Sunderland but Lab vote strong in North Tyneside, and expected to be very strong in Newcastle and Gateshead where Labour did better than expected last night.
Cambridgeshire: LDEM gain Duxford and Ely North from CON.
Interesting. Duxford I understand, but Ely North? Wow! That is Brexit central up there!
I think that for many people the Brexit issue is done and dusted. Obviously this is not the case for many others but there is a proportion of the Brexit voting population who are content that we have left and are now looking at voting based on entirely different factors. So now they are looking at the Lib Dems irrespective of their EU position and liking what they see. I would certainly say that I am in that position for some Lib Dem policies and see no point in disregarding them simply because of their position on an issue which is now effectively over for me.
Labour expecting better in Wales than perhaps seen elsewhere.
They are very confident of re-taking Rhondda from Plaid, which would mean Leanne Wood losing her place in the Senedd as she's not standing on the list.
They expect to lose Wrexham and Delyn in the North but hold onto everything else. Plaid making bullish noises about taking Aberconwy from the Tories too, which would be somewhat of a surprise.
So net one seat down if that's correct. A result they would undoubtedly be delighted with in the circumstances.
@josh_wingrove Biden touts his Buy American plans: "Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers."
“America first”, one could say. No new WTO trade round for some years...
A key belief on the left of the Democratic party is that international trade deals - especially NAFTA - paved the way for Trump, by selling out the skilled working class/lower middle class.
Don't know, but is this a problem for any nations who are setting a lot of store on a Big US Trade Deal? If, to take a purely hypothetical example they have recently weakened their existing arrangements to gain the flexibility to do a US deal?
Very hard to know what’s happening in Scotland as to who is benefiting from the increase in turnout . How many EU nationals who were granted leave to remain voted . Given how close some of the results could be this could be important .
Labour expecting better in Wales than perhaps seen elsewhere.
They are very confident of re-taking Rhondda from Plaid, which would mean Leanne Wood losing her place in the Senedd as she's not standing on the list.
They expect to lose Wrexham and Delyn in the North but hold onto everything else. Plaid making bullish noises about taking Aberconwy from the Tories too, which would be somewhat of a surprise.
So net one seat down if that's correct. A result they would undoubtedly be delighted with in the circumstances.
Good. I have a lot of time for Lee Waters, and his Llanelli seat was looking dicey.
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.
Good point.
Lack of education doesn't equate to lack of intelligence. Some of the biggest idiots out there are the most educated *
* Let me qualify that, I should have omitted the "Some of"
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
I think they have issues even though they are running behind a cloudflare proxy.
Yep, got the Cloudflare 403 error first, then the maintenance page.
This scalability stuff really isn’t difficult any more.
Well it can be if you are serving very personalised pages, but it really shouldn't be for this type of website which is just serving a fixed dataset that they update every 10 minutes.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
I think they have issues even though they are running behind a cloudflare proxy.
Yep, got the Cloudflare 403 error first, then the maintenance page.
This scalability stuff really isn’t difficult any more.
The 403 error which has been intermittent all morning means the origin server has already fallen over. I'm guessing they got tired of restarting it and have stuck up a sorry page to try some random tweaks. (Or it has just crashed somewhere else.)
Problem is Cloudflare might not be doing much *if* every request needs to go back to the origin server because every end user is demanding real time updates.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
People,think Hartlepool is grinding poverty but there are many places exactly like that in the seat.
Someone made the point, in the spectator I think, was the surprise wasn’t these fell to the Tories but they stayed labour so long.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
A fair chunk of what's happening is people moving and taking their views with them, rather than people shifting their views.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Edit: I see yourself and Mr Eek said pretty much the same as I typed that!
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.
Yes, we own style, and Hartlepool was detracting. So from that point of view, a stonking result.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
Thank you for confirming that.
And Cramlington North, which I believe was the safest Tory ward in the country until last night, also has the highest owner occupier rate in the country.
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?
The issue is that it is a relevant symbol in the US, but the US has very different historical issues with racism to the US and is in a much worse place to the UK today. That's not to pretend the UK don't has issues that it needs to think through but, to me at least, "taking the knee" looked like Starmer was reacting in a trite manner to a prevailing political wind rather than trying to address the problems and make things better for UK voters.
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
Thank you for confirming that.
And Cramlington North, which I believe was the safest Tory ward in the country until last night, also has the highest owner occupier rate in the country.
If you've got more err 'moderate' housing I think the OOs will be voting Tory and the renters Labour.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Yes, as I speculated a minute ago, it is probably that every end user has requested realtime updates and so every request hits the database. So they need to redesign the application so that realtime means a cached value that gets updated every 60 seconds, which might be hard to rewrite on the fly, or check the database diagnostics for easy tweaks, assuming they've paid a small fortune to Oracle (or whoever) for the diagnostics package.
I am wondering if there has been a major Facebook offensive ,especially in Scotland. I do not recall it being mentioned on here.
IIRC in 2015 the Tories worked very hard to hide the fact that their Facebook ad spend was close to a million a month, for six months before the election spending limits came in. All very highly targeted, with thousands of different ads. Will be interesting to see if something similar has been going on in Scotland under the radar.
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.
Actually both the swastika and death's head (as you acknowledge for the latter) *were* both used in "our culture" before the Nazi Party era in Germany.
Just briefly, death's heads are all over Medieval tombs.
There are Swastikas on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office building, which was put up before 1800. Presumably the inspiration came from India. It was used on an early 20C Scout Badge.
There is even a bronze age carving.
Nevermind Chelmsford Town Hall.
The tragedy is if we let our behaviour in 2021 be controlled by the ghost of an evil regime from 80 years ago which stole universally used symbols thousands of years old for less than 20 years.
And, of course, Hinduism (for one example) has been part of our culture for many decades now.
It's long past the time to be controlled by Adolph Hitler's ghost.
Very hard to know what’s happening in Scotland as to who is benefiting from the increase in turnout . How many EU nationals who were granted leave to remain voted . Given how close some of the results could be this could be important .
I know some and they are very, very angry about how they were lied to in indyref1 about No being the only way to stay in the EU.
Cambridgeshire: LDEM gain Duxford and Ely North from CON.
Interesting. Duxford I understand, but Ely North? Wow! That is Brexit central up there!
I think that for many people the Brexit issue is done and dusted. Obviously this is not the case for many others but there is a proportion of the Brexit voting population who are content that we have left and are now looking at voting based on entirely different factors. So now they are looking at the Lib Dems irrespective of their EU position and liking what they see. I would certainly say that I am in that position for some Lib Dem policies and see no point in disregarding them simply because of their position on an issue which is now effectively over for me.
*RT wakes up after next GE celebrating a hard-fought LibDem victory to find himself back in the EU*
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Edit: I see yourself and Mr Eek said pretty much the same as I typed that!
Anyway, when it comes back up we can watch Sadiq sweep majestically to victory in a city that has not had a Conservative mayor for a whole half century decade.
I recall our in-house polling gnu, after in depth analysis of polling both latest and in 2016/7, predicting Labour gains from the LibDems. So far at least, we're seeing the very opposite.
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?
The issue is that it is a relevant symbol in the US, but the US has very different historical issues with racism to the US and is in a much worse place to the UK today. That's not to pretend the UK don't has issues that it needs to think through but, to me at least, "taking the knee" looked like Starmer was reacting in a trite manner to a prevailing political wind rather than trying to address the problems and make things better for UK voters.
Even in the US, in the NFL where it all started, it really isn't widely done anymore by the players.
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
Well, yes, Tories only won it last time because Greens split the vote.
“London Elects website currently down “under maintainance”. They chose a funny day for their maintainence.
Their server has been under strain and throwing errors all morning. Classic capacity problem – no-one ever visits the site until the whole world comes knocking on the same day. It is like being a retailer at Christmas, or bookmaker on Grand National day. If you design for peak capacity, you waste a lot of money. If you design for typical load, your site falls over when it really matters.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
The thing is, it really isn’t that much more complicated any more. Companies like Cloudflare make scalability easy, this one looks like an internal issue between the web server and the database server - at a guess every user page refresh is hitting the DB server directly, rather than a stored procedure running once a minute on the DB and sending the numbers to the web server. The “maintainance” is probably to implement said stored procedure.
Yes, as I speculated a minute ago, it is probably that every end user has requested realtime updates and so every request hits the database. So they need to redesign the application so that realtime means a cached value that gets updated every 60 seconds, which might be hard to rewrite on the fly, or check the database diagnostics for easy tweaks, assuming they've paid a small fortune to Oracle (or whoever) for the diagnostics package.
I wasn’t picturing a fortune paid to Oracle, I was picturing an SQL ‘server’ running on the GLC IT guy’s laptop. That they suddenly realised was getting hit by thousands of requests a second from the Cloudflare-enabled web server.
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.
You think big business is prioritizing diversity over making profits?
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
Big Dom idea to concrete over the green belt via sped up AI automated planning decisions perhaps wasn't so crazy after all...
I have a 1922 copy of The Jungle Book. It has a little swastika on the front and many more decorating the inside.
The Finns used it as national insignia (ligh tblue swastika on white disc, equivalent to RAF roundels) from independence to the end of WW2. Interestingly, it's still in limited use in the FAF in unit heraldry
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.
Well quite. SNP will regain Edinburgh Central quite easily. The more telling rumour if true is if Banff is indeed close.
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.
Good point.
Lack of education doesn't equate to lack of intelligence. Some of the biggest idiots out there are the most educated *
* Let me qualify that, I should have omitted the "Some of"
I recall a paper written by a lady with 2 PhDs* on the subject of CDO^2 and the wonders of higher powers of CDO - written about 10 minutes before the band stopped playing in 2008.
*Yes, literally. really. One in maths and one in the field of economics, IIRC
Third labour loss in Durham. 1 seat to Lib Dem’s in Aycliffe north. It’s odd how the seats closer to Hartlepool are relatively good for labour.
What I found interesting that the urban core of Blyth and Ashington (in Northumberland) is still solidly Labour. It's the outskirts where the Persimmon new-builds are aplenty where the Tory vote is the strongest, like @Philip_Thompson says.
A fair chunk of what's happening is people moving and taking their views with them, rather than people shifting their views.
Maybe in small part, but not entirely. That's why the aggregate numbers are changing.
Who owns and lives in these Persimmon homes? Quite possibly people who were until these holes were built living and renting in the town.
By going from renters to owner occupiers their circumstances have massively changed.
Site under maintenance... I guess there isn't anything major planned for today...
Essential maintenance means something or other crashed and they are running around trying to get everyone onto a zoom call – let's hope their techies are not exhausted having been up all night watching the Hartlepool result. Probably webex rather than zoom as they are techies, or MS teams for the fanboys.
@josh_wingrove Biden touts his Buy American plans: "Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers."
“America first”, one could say. No new WTO trade round for some years...
A key belief on the left of the Democratic party is that international trade deals - especially NAFTA - paved the way for Trump, by selling out the skilled working class/lower middle class.
Assuming our politics is coalescing around old American demographics. Truss's new deals may begin to jar the New-Conservative voting block?
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.
To make a point the other way, I think a danger of woke is that the message, "just being not racist is a cop out, you must be an ANTI racist" can be (wrongly) taken as an instruction to view everything through the prism of race. You can then if you're not careful find yourself thinking about race all the time. Which is what racists do.
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
Well, yes, Tories only won it last time because Greens split the vote.
Same SGP candidate standing and SGP advancing in polls - have the greens realised their mistake last 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.
Cambridgeshire: LDEM gain Duxford and Ely North from CON.
Interesting. Duxford I understand, but Ely North? Wow! That is Brexit central up there!
I think that for many people the Brexit issue is done and dusted. Obviously this is not the case for many others but there is a proportion of the Brexit voting population who are content that we have left and are now looking at voting based on entirely different factors. So now they are looking at the Lib Dems irrespective of their EU position and liking what they see. I would certainly say that I am in that position for some Lib Dem policies and see no point in disregarding them simply because of their position on an issue which is now effectively over for me.
*RT wakes up after next GE celebrating a hard-fought LibDem victory to find himself back in the EU*
And if I thought that was remotely possible I would not even consider the Lib Dems. But it isn't. So I do.
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.
You think big business is prioritizing diversity over making profits?
A lot of big business is making the same mistake as politicians and journalists, in thinking that Twitter represents society.
Comments
Blackburn with Darwen: CON gain Audley & Queen's Park from LAB.
You might remember CON candidate Tiger Patel's campaign video:
[Photo of Mr Patel in a playground standing with unfortunately placed 'suck penis' graffiti in front of his lower body]
https://twitter.com/willJones200/status/1390628675914244097
CON - Edwina Currie - 1878
LAB - Ruth George - 2544
GRN 138
LD 340
Set standards and support councils in reaching them. Don't impose systems from above.
Lots of LD votes in the South will be Tory if the choice is Lab or Tory.
If it is a replay of 2016 then that is a huge Unionist surge.
But maybe Unionist surge is tapped out and it is nationalists on top.
No one knows.
But that was under previous management.
The promise of cloud computing was instant scaling of computing resources as demand increased. Turns out it is slightly more complicated than that.
https://twitter.com/BenKentish/status/1390590110052323331
This scalability stuff really isn’t difficult any more.
Sedgefield - Conservative
Kirkcaldy- SNP
Edinburgh South West - SNP
Copeland - Conservative
Ashfield - Conservative
Darlington - Conservative
Redcar - Conservative
Hartlepool - Conservative
Airdrie and Shotts - Conservative
Edinburgh East - Conservative
(No doubt to be cited as proof that Blair was a Tory all along...)
Latest rumours are 50/50 Lab/Con in Sunderland but Lab vote strong in North Tyneside, and expected to be very strong in Newcastle and Gateshead where Labour did better than expected last night.
They are very confident of re-taking Rhondda from Plaid, which would mean Leanne Wood losing her place in the Senedd as she's not standing on the list.
They expect to lose Wrexham and Delyn in the North but hold onto everything else. Plaid making bullish noises about taking Aberconwy from the Tories too, which would be somewhat of a surprise.
So net one seat down if that's correct. A result they would undoubtedly be delighted with in the circumstances.
Good afternoon, everybody.
* Let me qualify that, I should have omitted the "Some of"
Problem is Cloudflare might not be doing much *if* every request needs to go back to the origin server because every end user is demanding real time updates.
Someone made the point, in the spectator I think, was the surprise wasn’t these fell to the Tories but they stayed labour so long.
Edit: I see yourself and Mr Eek said pretty much the same as I typed that!
Where, though?
My strategy has been to lay the middle of the snp seat bands at the shortest odds possible.
Just briefly, death's heads are all over Medieval tombs.
There are Swastikas on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office building, which was put up before 1800. Presumably the inspiration came from India. It was used on an early 20C Scout Badge.
There is even a bronze age carving.
Nevermind Chelmsford Town Hall.
The tragedy is if we let our behaviour in 2021 be controlled by the ghost of an evil regime from 80 years ago which stole universally used symbols thousands of years old for less than 20 years.
And, of course, Hinduism (for one example) has been part of our culture for many decades now.
It's long past the time to be controlled by Adolph Hitler's ghost.
centurydecade.Ooops
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Air_Wing,_Finnish_Air_Force
The Latvian AF also used a swastika as a component of the national insignia from 1919 on till WW2.
Jones (LAB): 43.3% (-7.6)
Hart (CON): 28.2% (+7.1)
Calladine (IND): 8.1% (New)
Budden (YSP): 6.4% (+1.4)
Briggs (IND): 6.1% (New)
Draper (GRN): 5.3% (New)
Duhre (RFM): 1.6% (New)
2nd Round:
Jones (LAB): 59.8% (E)
Hart (CON): 40.2%
Labour HOLD.
*Yes, literally. really. One in maths and one in the field of economics, IIRC
https://twitter.com/Queen_UK/status/1390628976742354945?s=19
Who owns and lives in these Persimmon homes? Quite possibly people who were until these holes were built living and renting in the town.
By going from renters to owner occupiers their circumstances have massively changed.