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Remember that a CON-LD swing smaller than in C&A in 1990 led to Maggie going within a month – politi
Remember that a CON-LD swing smaller than in C&A in 1990 led to Maggie going within a month – politicalbetting.com
Lots of excuses being made this morning by those trying to explain the Tory flop in C&A but surprisingly little on its impact on the position of the PM who has been riding high in recent months over the handling of the vaccine.
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But go to love Brits who go overseas and break local laws.
A British man was arrested and now faces up to six months in prison in Singapore after he was filmed on a train without a mask.
Father-of-two Benjamin Glynn, 39, claims his passport has been confiscated and he has unable to return to the UK with his family whilst he awaits trial.
Mr Glynn, who says he believes masks are pointless and fail to protect people from contracting Covid, wasn't wearing a face-covering he took a train home from work in the South East Asian citystate last month, where they are mandatory.
Unbeknown to him, he was secretly filmed by a fellow commuter who then put the clip on social media.
That led to officers arresting him just hours later.
After 28 hours in a cell, Benjamin, from Helmsley, North Yorkshire, was charged with a public nuisance offence.
Benjamin's passport was confiscated, meaning he couldn't return to the UK as planned with his partner and two children - aged five and two.
He also lost a new job he was due to start in the UK and fears he could have to spend as much as 12 months on bail before his trial.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/dad-detained-singapore-after-video-20845645
Starmer probably will be, the Labour party are notoriously slow to get rid of underperforming leaders.
Hartlepool and C&A both Brexit. Very little else.
I didn’t stay up on the thread, what we’re GBN saying about strawberries?
Take PB, David Herdson and myself are lifelong Tories, we've spent most of our adult lives campaigning for the Tory party, helping lots of councillors and MPs get elected, yet we fled the Tory party when BJ became PM, we knew this is what would happen.
Boris Johnson does many deeply unConservative things.
Mrs Thatcher would be spinning in her grave at his electoral and fuck business policies for example.
I'm not going back to the Tory party for a while.
Not voting for anyone else mind.
But lets not overegg the pudding. Surely the Crosby by-election is the precedent here, not Eastbourne.
Will never make a dodgy bar chart reference again!
The Tories need to pray that their new found support in disadvantaged leave seats isn't as shallow as I suspect it is.
It wasn't.
So we're back to LibDems imitating David Steel circa 1981.
Now does the government have problems - most certainly.
And anything which shakes them out of their complacent lethargy is good for them and, far more importantly, good for the country.
When they realise Brexit is a flaming bag on their doorstep, their votes will no longer be secure...
Hope he likes prison food - or worse, he’ll be bailed for a year, unable to work and unable to leave.
I live in the city where Brits abroad are most likely to be arrested - but most of the time, the police are perfectly reasonable, so long as you respect them and don’t behave like a twat.
May weakened the Union by agreeing to solve the NI issue first, rather than getting a general compromise.
Boris inherited NI as an ongoing Kobayashi Maru unwinnable problem and he has done the only responsible thing to win: he cheated. He got the EU to replace the backstop with a protocol, but a protocol only he can implement, without any intention of implementing it the way they wanted it implementing. That leaves the ball in their court, they have no choice but to compromise, rolling back the mistakes of prior Prime Ministers.
That was an incredible, hugely productive, trick.
But I wonder how that plays out at the next election when the Conservatives are the ones in power both at the council and constituency level.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/
Perhaps the government wants a trade deal with Putin ?
Or perhaps they're just utterly crap at border control.
In any case, few applicants choose a college for informed educational reasons - and mostly it's hard to see how they even could, given that most colleges are very similar to each other both educationally and in other respects.
What typically happens is either the applicant knows someone who gives advice that they don't check out (for example some still say "King's is good for maths") or else somebody at the school heavily pushes one college, often on the basis of utterly crap beliefs that derive from their (poorly reflected-on) experience at Cambridge or Oxford a generation ago and whose advice probably also includes things like "wear a suit to the interview".
I'm not sure what individual freedom has to do with it. The Oxford and Cambridge colleges are public bodies which supposedly serve the public interest and they should not be free to do what they want.
Duplication of functions by the colleges (both in admissions and in the supervision of students) is highly wasteful of public funds but not a single time have I seen this undesirable effect of the college system put in the balance against alleged benefits.
My take on C&A is that the core Tory vote stayed at home because of four things they are pissed off about, which will be replicated across the south unless the Tories address them:
1. Planning / Development - HS2, home building on the green belt. Tory voters don't want massive Wimpey estates swamping the countryside and feel powerless with local plans to do anything about it. Ditto new rail lines with questionable economic benefits.
2. COVID - Tory voters have had enough and are dismayed at how unconservative the government is behaving. They worry about the economic damage and the bill to come and they worry about what kind of country we are bequeathing to children / grand-children.
3. Green stuff - Tory voters are very sceptical about the justification for the Green agenda and worry they are going to be forced to pay for it.
4. Woke stuff - this has gone beyond a joke for Tory voters who want politicians to clamp down hard on it.
Political party positions on these 4 issues will play a big part in the next GE - it's going to be a divide based on Remainer / Brexit mindsets IMO ... and you're right that Labour doesn't have a strong brand in that debate.
But people like you enabled it.
But it really takes a certain level of stupidity to break a law that exists in both the UK and Singapore on a point of principle due to his inability to grasp basic science.
I also suspect he most have truly annoyed the police when they arrested him as otherwise they would have gone for the far easier deportation approach.
I think the Hancock thing played a (small) part too. It is surely untenable for him to stay in place as he will forever be known as Hopeless Hancock, and leaves Johnson as either weak or re-enforces the attack line that Boris does not care or take his role seriously. It wouldn't have been so bad for Hancock if the insult was not alliterative.
Well done Libs in Amersham.
https://twitter.com/jonwalker121/status/1405818650834178049
Now the Tories still lead Labour in the polls who are making no progress whatsover on 2019, the only progress being made is by the LDs in Tory Remain seats in the South East with lots of Nimbys opposed to new development in the greenbelt like Chesham and Amersham
This UEFA "where should we play the finals now that the UK is in a third/fourth wave?" story has all the ingredients of a massive kerfuffle....
* The strong British preference for "fairness" (no special rules for VIPs).
* The arguably Brexit-related status of borders/vaccine passports.
* UK gov. lecturing others about "sticking to their agreements".
* The British public misunderstanding of the virus situation in the EU.
https://twitter.com/thomasforth/status/1405817315351044099?s=20
Although I fear the EU's virus situation may catch up with the British public's understanding of it...
Then Osbourne gutted the LD seats and Cameron won a majority so had to actually hold a referendum he really didn't want.
Yes, police almost everywhere are nice enough people, and so long as you don’t escalate any given minor situation, you’ll usually be fine. I suspect in this case he made an arse of himself, and told the policemen that the law was rubbish.
https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1405816651841478656?s=20
Many students choose on the basis of ex curricular factors, eg who is head of the river.
The problem for Starmer Labour is it is too posh and anti Brexit for the Leave heavy Red Wall, not posh and anti Brexit enough for the Home Counties Remain seats
https://covid.joinzoe.com/data?mc_cid=b8bcef9ede&mc_eid=dc4978d054#vaccinations
Fans who had Oxford vaccine banned from Bruce Springsteen concert
Only US-approved jabs will qualify people to attend, to the disappointment of many who had hoped to watch ‘The Boss’ on Broadway
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/17/oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine-fans-banned-bruce-springsteen-concert/
By doing a Kirk and rewriting the rules of the simulation, the ball back in the court of the EU and a compromise is inevitable, which is how it should have always been.
And the fisherman aren’t even happy, not as happy as the Brexit government, who now have British fish swimming in British waters.
For me, HS2 aligned directly with #1. Ironically I think HS2 will cause far less disruption to the countryside than the swathes of new housing estates obliterating the land. However, it is a totemic issue.
https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1405814177281757184?s=20
Southern Conservatives are very very worried this morning about planning reform and troubles for the next election. The Lib Dems will likely become the new Nimby party.
We support rail (but not here!)
We support house building (but not here!)
Not sure how you build a national platform off that....
Though I would say it was Clegg who gutted the LibDems over tuition fees.
Incredible though it now seems many LibDems, including Mike Smithson, thought that was going to be a vote winner at the time.
I'm not sure its 'tectonic' but will start to frame the battleground for the next election, once COVID has passed.
It does show the weakness the Tories has in terms of their small 'c' conservative base through, middle class older 'trad blue' voters which probably don't think highly of Boris and his macho. Those which might well vote for the 'nicer' Lib Dems and that nice Mr Davey.
Lib Dem/Lab/Green/UKIP whoever... there's a wide range of choice out there.
Starmer needs the plums to say, unequivocally, that Labour, as a party, believes Brexit is a catastrophic error. If that leads to losing more red wall seats (including my own, and I don't particularly want to have a Tory MP) then, sadly, that is a symptom of politics shifting to a Leave/Remain divide.
Because Labour are trying to ignore Brexit, and pleasing no-one. They're not Brexity enough for Leavers, everyone knows there's no conviction, and they're repelling Remainers for not being anti-Brexit enough.
The Tories have screwed Labour good and proper. Their austerity pissed the Red Wall off, they blamed a lot of it on forrins (so many people up here think they can't get a doctor's appointment for weeks because we're swamped with immigrants, esp Muslim immigrants), the two Leave campaigns promised everything to everyone. It's shameless, opportunistic. mendacious and brilliant.
And yes, the Remain campaign was shite. But, ultimately, it was headed by Tories. So it couldn't say stuff like, for example, 'Don't vote Leave 'cos the Tories will, given half a chance, take an axe to worker's rights the EU protects' or 'Don't vote Leave cos, given half a chance, the Tories will go for Thatcherism on steroids and happily lay waste to things like the fishing industry', because it was ultimately headed by... Tories.
What swung it was entering into government and abandoning those principled stands, abandoning everyone who stood with you on each principled position now dumped into the trash.
https://twitter.com/RaynerSkyNews/status/1405824969108508672
says the lord of the £5 bet.....
The Lib Dems have Vera Hobhouse on their front bench. She’s a conspiracy theorist.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/technology-55399513.amp
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/26/why-would-the-lib-dems-hook-up-with-5g-cranks-it-can-only-be-cowardice?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Can’t vote for the Greens as they are watermelons.
Can’t vote for UKIP or any Farage type party.
I live in a Lab/LD marginal so it doesn’t really matter to the Tories who wins this seat.
For the foreseeable future I shall be spoiling my ballot paper in increasingly amusing ways.
Some people act as if planning changes will mean the whole country would turn into concrete, that's not what it means, its not what it could ever mean. 5% of land is housing now, even if we added 3 million extra homes not 300k at the same density, all on greenfield farming land, it would mean 5.5% of the country being housing and 69.5% of the country being agriculture.
People who abjectly fear construction, or who use such fear to protect their house prices, are the real ones who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Cheap labour because no-one local is willing to work for the low rates on offer.
No additional housing because the rich people like their existing views.
While both demands are contradictory you need to join the dots to see that fact and most people simple aren't interested or capable of doing so.
1-0 to the NOT Hartlipudlians.
This is a brilliant article on David Cameron
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2021/04/david-cameron-and-great-sell-out
However, for me I would be pleased to see Boris succeeded by Sunak, Hunt or even Truss and for a more conventual government than Boris, who is good at winning elections, apart from this one, but poor on anything to do with decision making, and in particular difficult decision making
However, I doubt it will be Boris for the immediate high jump rather than Starmer, who has to win B & S as anything less would confirm labour as actually marginalised, not just in the north, but in the south and of course is nowhere in Scotland
Interesting days
https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1405815350118305794?s=20
Although 1 dose does significantly reduce your protection against catching Indian variant COVID, it is basically still the same high level of protection against serious illness / hospitalization, and 2nd doses basically no difference...still upto 98% reduction against getting really ill.
That is really positive news. Get everybody double dosed and basically the only people we should be seeing in hospital are morons and the unfortunate very old / very frail.
There will be some localised seats where Labour can point to issues caused by Brexit and play on that.
But nationally Labour needs to return to being about the balance between labour and capital. Not in the old fashioned divisive trade union ways, but simply about restoring hopes and dreams to the opportunities of ordinary working people, which means supporting education, businesses and investment, not class war.
Quotes from Theresa May (pictured) and IDS criticising the reforms. (One Tory MP who visited a dozen times told me these ‘cut through’) https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1405828787129008128/photo/1