Nissan confirm they are to build a 1 billion pound car battery factory in Sunderland
Absolutely coincidental that this announced on by Election Day
I hadn't thought about that but if so good politics
The BBC also says that 'The government is contributing to the cost of the expansion, but a precise figure has not been disclosed.'
Ion other words, a massive handout. Some might call it a bribe.
The EU will be taking those unilateral "appropriate remedial measures" described in the TCA. Batten down the hatches.
I think it is sad that anyone would support the EU v the UK investing in green technology and jobs
I think it is sad that anyone would break an international treaty that they signed so recently the ink isn’t dry. Sad and very, very serious.
As many on here will know, I don't think Brexit was a sensible policy, in fact I think it was and is insane. However, I think in terms of our dealings with the EU bloc there is something to be said to playing them at their own game. The French have long ignored EU rules when it didn't suit them and nothing happened. We always played by the rules and generally got shafted. I am not keen on having a dishonest PM, but in the realpolitik of international relations there may be some upsides.
You’ve swallowed too much UKIP bullshit. Time to come up for air Nige.
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
This thread highlights the problem with Johnson for his opponents. The incumbent Government is very short price favourite to a gain a seat at a by election in an opposition heartland. That is normally such a rare event but will be the 2nd time it has happened in a couple of months. As much as he mumbles and bumbles around, as bad as he is at PMQs, he is very popular with enough voters. That is why he is hated so much by his opponents, they just cant't believe or understand it.
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
I think the SNP do a (mainly) decent job in government, especially considering they're now in their 4th term. I also think that Scottish independence is inevitable and that I will likely vote for it as the Union is unsustainable.
That is very different from me wanting to become a member of or support the SNP. I hope that independent Scotland would retain its general level of civilisation and decency which has been lost south of the wall, but there are other parties who can deliver that.
Thank you for a fair analysis, and hopefully your vote when the day arrives!
There is nothing inevitable about Scottish Independence however much diehard anti Tories like Rochdale may hope there is
It would be insane for both Scotland and the rest of the UK but with Boris as PM it's possible....
He has already cast off Northern Ireland. Protestations about Boris being a unionist have no value when he is delivering anti-union policies. Nor am I obsessed by minutiae poll movements like the Essicks Massiv - this is a long game and the government dilute the arguments for staying every single day.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
The reason Curtice says “the Indy argument is cooling” is precisely because of brexit. It is never ending, complex, full of contradictions and it is playing out in front of everyone.
How the SNP argues the same doesn’t happen with Indy (on a larger scale) is one for them to answer.
From the SNP's standpoint, the best thing would have been for the UK to stay in the EU. It would then not have this exact issue played out in front of the populace and there is a strong argument to say that, if Scotland voted for independence while the UK was part of the EU, there would have been a fair few EU members happy to see Scotland get a good divorce settlement and remain in the EU, if only to p1ss off the rest of the UK.
Brexit, and the way it has played out, may ironically prove to be the saviour of the Union
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
I read that first time as "a billionaire trapped in a ladyboy's body..."
Nissan confirm they are to build a 1 billion pound car battery factory in Sunderland
Absolutely coincidental that this announced on by Election Day
I hadn't thought about that but if so good politics
The BBC also says that 'The government is contributing to the cost of the expansion, but a precise figure has not been disclosed.'
Ion other words, a massive handout. Some might call it a bribe.
I am sorry but investing in the future green economy is essential and is actively promoted by all governments
All governments recently signed a “level playing field” treaty, but one of the signatories was crossing their fingers behind their back. Guess which one.
The EU are over and the UK will decide on investments and jobs
Investment decisions will surely be based on access to markets into which to sell, so the EU is not over. It's just that the relationship and dependency is different.
The EU dictating UK investment decisions to the UK government is over
Bollocks. Your BritNat government just signed a “level playing field” treaty that explicitly says the exact opposite.
Maggie must be spinning in her grave that her party has morphed into the party of big government, state subsidy and picking winners. It’ll end in tears… for the taxpayers.
Creating jobs and green investments will end in 'tears' of joy for the taxpayers not pain
So you think civil servants and politicians are best placed to decide what companies produce stuff. Governments should be creating strategic policies (eg for green investment) they should not be perverting the market or deciding who gets the business by giving subsidies. I can't believe a Tory believes this. Why not go the whole hog and nationalise it?
Civil servants and politicians should not be allowed anywhere near business decisions. They bugger it up every time they interfere.
The difference is that there is a political will to move the green agenda faster than the market would led to its own devices
Absolutely, but that should be by strategic decisions that the Govt has control over (eg infrastructure) and not subsidising individual businesses.
Out there could be an entrepreneur at the forefront of producing batteries that are better and cheaper. He currently employs 20 engineers, but will become the Bill Gates of the green revolution employing 10s of thousands of UK employees. His first big deal is Nissan because his batteries are better and cheaper.
But no someone in Whitehall who has never heard of him gives £100m to Nissan snuffing him out at birth.
Nissan confirm they are to build a 1 billion pound car battery factory in Sunderland
Absolutely coincidental that this announced on by Election Day
I hadn't thought about that but if so good politics
The BBC also says that 'The government is contributing to the cost of the expansion, but a precise figure has not been disclosed.'
Ion other words, a massive handout. Some might call it a bribe.
The EU will be taking those unilateral "appropriate remedial measures" described in the TCA. Batten down the hatches.
I think it is sad that anyone would support the EU v the UK investing in green technology and jobs
I think it is sad that anyone would break an international treaty that they signed so recently the ink isn’t dry. Sad and very, very serious.
As many on here will know, I don't think Brexit was a sensible policy, in fact I think it was and is insane. However, I think in terms of our dealings with the EU bloc there is something to be said to playing them at their own game. The French have long ignored EU rules when it didn't suit them and nothing happened. We always played by the rules and generally got shafted. I am not keen on having a dishonest PM, but in the realpolitik of international relations there may be some upsides.
You’ve swallowed too much UKIP bullshit. Time to come up for air Nige.
My view on UKIP is the same as my view on SNP: a bunch of crypto-fascists whose real raison d'etre is their hatred of others that don't fit in their archaic view of humanity. So, no I don't swallow any of their BS, or that that emanates from a party that used to have a leader that was recently described by his QC as a bully and a sex pest.
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
Jason Groves @JasonGroves1 · 5m Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
And from the POV of Red Wall voters, labour shortages are a pretty good thing.
It will certainly be fun to watch. All of those jobs that the poor downtrodden English didn't want to do are now available again now that Harry Hun has been sent packing. Rural Anglia where the food industry had a shortage of labour even with a big eastern European contigent now gets to offer to the good people of Wisbech a job in the food factories.
What do you mean you don't want to work in a factory? Didn't you vote to get rid of the forrin so these jobs could be yours again like they weren't before?
The question is whether the issue was the nature of the job itself or the pay. If the former, agreed, it will be interesting. However, it is basic economics, that if you increase the supply of labour - especially cheap labour - wages are bound to go down. Maybe we see wages go to a level that starts to attract people.
Another question of course is whether many of these jobs which were done by cheap foreign labour are now automated.
Two of my former employers had factories in that area. Wages and conditions were already well above where they had been. OK so its 4 years back now but one factory manager told me that they couldn't hire labour at any price to do night shifts, which capped capacity and allowed competition into the market from the EU.
My suspicion is that the person to blame is Simon Cowell. We have raise at least one generation who don't want to do the kind of work that is available because its beneath them and anyway they're really talented or whatever.
Before anyone asks. I have worked in a call centre. I have worked in a warehouse. I have worked in a food factory slicing cucumbers all day. I have stacked shelves in a supermarket. I have done night shifts. All honest work that (for the time) payed decently.
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
Jason Groves @JasonGroves1 · 5m Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
Prof Pagel is currently throwing things at her telly...
Nissan confirm they are to build a 1 billion pound car battery factory in Sunderland
Absolutely coincidental that this announced on by Election Day
I hadn't thought about that but if so good politics
The BBC also says that 'The government is contributing to the cost of the expansion, but a precise figure has not been disclosed.'
Ion other words, a massive handout. Some might call it a bribe.
I am sorry but investing in the future green economy is essential and is actively promoted by all governments
All governments recently signed a “level playing field” treaty, but one of the signatories was crossing their fingers behind their back. Guess which one.
The EU are over and the UK will decide on investments and jobs
Investment decisions will surely be based on access to markets into which to sell, so the EU is not over. It's just that the relationship and dependency is different.
The EU dictating UK investment decisions to the UK government is over
Bollocks. Your BritNat government just signed a “level playing field” treaty that explicitly says the exact opposite.
Maggie must be spinning in her grave that her party has morphed into the party of big government, state subsidy and picking winners. It’ll end in tears… for the taxpayers.
Creating jobs and green investments will end in 'tears' of joy for the taxpayers not pain
So you think civil servants and politicians are best placed to decide what companies produce stuff. Governments should be creating strategic policies (eg for green investment) they should not be perverting the market or deciding who gets the business by giving subsidies. I can't believe a Tory believes this. Why not go the whole hog and nationalise it?
Civil servants and politicians should not be allowed anywhere near business decisions. They bugger it up every time they interfere.
The difference is that there is a political will to move the green agenda faster than the market would led to its own devices
Absolutely, but that should be by strategic decisions that the Govt has control over (eg infrastructure) and not subsidising individual businesses.
Out there could be an entrepreneur at the forefront of producing batteries that are better and cheaper. He currently employs 20 engineers, but will become the Bill Gates of the green revolution employing 10s of thousands of UK employees. His first big deal is Nissan because his batteries are better and cheaper.
But no someone in Whitehall who has never heard of him gives £100m to Nissan snuffing him out at birth.
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Yes, I think that until there is independence the SNP with all its many faults and infighting will dominate Scotland. Afterwards it can safely be dissolved, into rival parties, and more functional politics.
One party states are not good, whether SNP in Holyrood, Labour in Cardiff, DUP in Stormont or Tory in Westminster. They all generate sleaze when hegemonic.
!
And Drakeford’s Welsh Labour does not seem to be as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was when it had hegemony.
Drakeford himself is unassuming, but the grip Welsh Labour has on public life in Wales is way more arrogant & sleazy than anything in Westminster.
Llafur have run Wales as a one-party state since 1999, to no apparent benefit to anyone apart from themselves. They have prospered while the Welsh are fed on scraps.
If Llafur is not as "as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was", then SLAB must have been really something special in terms of semi-criminal organisations.
Oh, it was. It fostered George Galloway for a start. And there are plenty more repulsive mafioso deep in the sewers of SLAB history.
I don’t think anyone in England or Wales can conceive just how vicious and filthy Scottish Labour had become by the last quarter of the 20th century. You had to be there. I was and saw it with my own eyes.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
This thread highlights the problem with Johnson for his opponents. The incumbent Government is very short price favourite to a gain a seat at a by election in an opposition heartland. That is normally such a rare event but will be the 2nd time it has happened in a couple of months. As much as he mumbles and bumbles around, as bad as he is at PMQs, he is very popular with enough voters. That is why he is hated so much by his opponents, they just cant't believe or understand it.
Wrong analysis. We more despair that there are folk like yourself that are so gullible that you put such a silly, incompetent and flawed man on a pedestal. I feel sorry for you, I really do.
And from the POV of Red Wall voters, labour shortages are a pretty good thing.
It will certainly be fun to watch. All of those jobs that the poor downtrodden English didn't want to do are now available again now that Harry Hun has been sent packing. Rural Anglia where the food industry had a shortage of labour even with a big eastern European contigent now gets to offer to the good people of Wisbech a job in the food factories.
What do you mean you don't want to work in a factory? Didn't you vote to get rid of the forrin so these jobs could be yours again like they weren't before?
The question is whether the issue was the nature of the job itself or the pay. If the former, agreed, it will be interesting. However, it is basic economics, that if you increase the supply of labour - especially cheap labour - wages are bound to go down. Maybe we see wages go to a level that starts to attract people.
Another question of course is whether many of these jobs which were done by cheap foreign labour are now automated.
Two of my former employers had factories in that area. Wages and conditions were already well above where they had been. OK so its 4 years back now but one factory manager told me that they couldn't hire labour at any price to do night shifts, which capped capacity and allowed competition into the market from the EU.
My suspicion is that the person to blame is Simon Cowell. We have raise at least one generation who don't want to do the kind of work that is available because its beneath them and anyway they're really talented or whatever.
Before anyone asks. I have worked in a call centre. I have worked in a warehouse. I have worked in a food factory slicing cucumbers all day. I have stacked shelves in a supermarket. I have done night shifts. All honest work that (for the time) payed decently.
Social media.....50 years ago, you only heard vaguely about rich people and what they owned, the lives they led, etc...most people's reference points were just their family and friends and their work colleagues.
Now everybody is on instanta seeing the lives of the rich and famous, and all the faker influencers telling you that you can have this if you just do (insert get rich quick scheme).
So far too many people think all I need to do is make it on YouTube, Twitch, Instanta....I don't need that boring night shift job.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
"Rescue" is a sentimental scam. You don't buy the dog but you pay a rehoming fee spookily close to a purchase price for an animal which often needs rescuing from the habit of biting postmen/sheep by an injection of pentobarbital. But you feel really good about yourself.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
This thread highlights the problem with Johnson for his opponents. The incumbent Government is very short price favourite to a gain a seat at a by election in an opposition heartland. That is normally such a rare event but will be the 2nd time it has happened in a couple of months. As much as he mumbles and bumbles around, as bad as he is at PMQs, he is very popular with enough voters. That is why he is hated so much by his opponents, they just cant't believe or understand it.
Brexit Derangement Syndrome has morphed into the variant Boris Derangement Syndrome.
There may be a vaccine, but delivery isn't expected until at least 2023. And even then, huge numbers will still refuse that vaccine. They either don't get BDS, or if they do, the symptoms don't stop them from getting on with their lives, even as some over-educated ABC's whine like a mozzie after dusk....
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
I think the SNP do a (mainly) decent job in government, especially considering they're now in their 4th term. I also think that Scottish independence is inevitable and that I will likely vote for it as the Union is unsustainable.
That is very different from me wanting to become a member of or support the SNP. I hope that independent Scotland would retain its general level of civilisation and decency which has been lost south of the wall, but there are other parties who can deliver that.
Thank you for a fair analysis, and hopefully your vote when the day arrives!
There is nothing inevitable about Scottish Independence however much diehard anti Tories like Rochdale may hope there is
It would be insane for both Scotland and the rest of the UK but with Boris as PM it's possible....
He has already cast off Northern Ireland. Protestations about Boris being a unionist have no value when he is delivering anti-union policies. Nor am I obsessed by minutiae poll movements like the Essicks Massiv - this is a long game and the government dilute the arguments for staying every single day.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
The PB Ultras want to partition Scotland, incarcerate the traitorous SNP and send gunboats up the Forth at dawn. And they still won’t be happy…
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
Jason Groves @JasonGroves1 · 5m Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
Prof Pagel is currently throwing things at her telly...
That'll make a change - because she's normally actually on the telly 24 hours a day warning of catastrophe.
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
Pagel new shifting of the goal posts is can't open up until we have jabbed all the kids. Rising cases, long covid, variants, yadda yadda yadda.
My sense is that Prof Pagel knows the game's up – she has been focusing on her favourite show, Love Island, in the last few days.
P.S. Any other crossword fans find it fitting that the high priestess of the zerocovidians is an avid fan of Love Island? (love being a synonym for zero, island a cue for Britain).
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Yes, I think that until there is independence the SNP with all its many faults and infighting will dominate Scotland. Afterwards it can safely be dissolved, into rival parties, and more functional politics.
One party states are not good, whether SNP in Holyrood, Labour in Cardiff, DUP in Stormont or Tory in Westminster. They all generate sleaze when hegemonic.
!
And Drakeford’s Welsh Labour does not seem to be as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was when it had hegemony.
Drakeford himself is unassuming, but the grip Welsh Labour has on public life in Wales is way more arrogant & sleazy than anything in Westminster.
Llafur have run Wales as a one-party state since 1999, to no apparent benefit to anyone apart from themselves. They have prospered while the Welsh are fed on scraps.
If Llafur is not as "as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was", then SLAB must have been really something special in terms of semi-criminal organisations.
Oh, it was. It fostered George Galloway for a start. And there are plenty more repulsive mafioso deep in the sewers of SLAB history.
I don’t think anyone in England or Wales can conceive just how vicious and filthy Scottish Labour had become by the last quarter of the 20th century. You had to be there. I was and saw it with my own eyes.
So says a man that supports a party that is in large part what it is today because of Alex Salmond, a slimier and more repulsive an individual it is impossible to find in the British Isles, even if one includes Galloway. SNP supporters pretty much drove Charles Kennedy to his death. They put bricks through peoples windows that disagree with them and their trolls are of the premier league in viciousness and unpleasantness. They really are the nasty party. Take the beam out of thine own eye Stuart!
And from the POV of Red Wall voters, labour shortages are a pretty good thing.
It will certainly be fun to watch. All of those jobs that the poor downtrodden English didn't want to do are now available again now that Harry Hun has been sent packing. Rural Anglia where the food industry had a shortage of labour even with a big eastern European contigent now gets to offer to the good people of Wisbech a job in the food factories.
What do you mean you don't want to work in a factory? Didn't you vote to get rid of the forrin so these jobs could be yours again like they weren't before?
The question is whether the issue was the nature of the job itself or the pay. If the former, agreed, it will be interesting. However, it is basic economics, that if you increase the supply of labour - especially cheap labour - wages are bound to go down. Maybe we see wages go to a level that starts to attract people.
Another question of course is whether many of these jobs which were done by cheap foreign labour are now automated.
Two of my former employers had factories in that area. Wages and conditions were already well above where they had been. OK so its 4 years back now but one factory manager told me that they couldn't hire labour at any price to do night shifts, which capped capacity and allowed competition into the market from the EU.
My suspicion is that the person to blame is Simon Cowell. We have raise at least one generation who don't want to do the kind of work that is available because its beneath them and anyway they're really talented or whatever.
Before anyone asks. I have worked in a call centre. I have worked in a warehouse. I have worked in a food factory slicing cucumbers all day. I have stacked shelves in a supermarket. I have done night shifts. All honest work that (for the time) payed decently.
Social media.....50 years ago, you only heard vaguely about rich people and what they owned, the lives they led, etc...most people's reference points were just their family and friends and their work colleagues.
Now everybody is on instanta seeing the lives of the rich and famous, and all the faker influencers telling you that you can have this if you just do (insert get rich quick scheme).
So far too many people think all I need to do is make it on YouTube, Twitch, Instanta....I don't need that boring night shift job.
Well, yes, to some extent. Though I don't buy the 'couldn't hire labour at any price' line. 'Couldn't hire labour at a price I was prepared to pay', perhaps.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
The problem for Boris's opponents is that he's the living totem of Brexit - an epochal issue that bitterly divided the nation and sent emotions into warp drive. Because of that, for 50% of the population, Boris can literally do no wrong. Everything else is forgiven. They hold him a debt of gratitude that can never be relinquished. Poor Sir Keir. How on earth was he ever supposed to compete with that?
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
Your description of Sunak and his diminutive size …
‘The British people won’t vote for a fucking Borrower’
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
Jason Groves @JasonGroves1 · 5m Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
Prof Pagel is currently throwing things at her telly...
She's furious that that Scottish girl has been kicked out of Love Island?
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Or the SNP will become like the ANC in South Africa. The victors of independence not working for their people, but getting voted in continuously anyway ...
What happens to the SNP if it doesn’t achieve independence? Seems an alternative and interesting question
They are like the Earl of Bruce’s spider
Indeed. We’ll try, try and try again, until we win.
Scots only need to win once. The BritNats need to win every time. This is only going to end one way.
(Charles, at the time of the spider story he was already king.)
No you will not because the UK government will not allow you to.
2014 was a once in a generation vote and you will not get another until a generation has elapsed since then if ever.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Act 1998 anyway
*Your* UK government will (foolishly) not allow Scots to express their free will at the ballot box. Another UK government will.
At this moment in time I think Sturgeon will be the one having second thoughts as independence popularity wanes and Scots fear for their pensions
Question. As pensions were not under threat in 2014 does that mean that Liar plans to play politics with people's pensions as you suggest?
Does not the apparent willingness of the supposed UK government to blackmail Scotland just make it obvious why every day that goes past strengthens the case that the Union must come to an end?
No
You accept that the UK government now threaten pensions as a hostage where previous Tory government wouldn't stoop that low though.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
I think the SNP do a (mainly) decent job in government, especially considering they're now in their 4th term. I also think that Scottish independence is inevitable and that I will likely vote for it as the Union is unsustainable.
That is very different from me wanting to become a member of or support the SNP. I hope that independent Scotland would retain its general level of civilisation and decency which has been lost south of the wall, but there are other parties who can deliver that.
Thank you for a fair analysis, and hopefully your vote when the day arrives!
There is nothing inevitable about Scottish Independence however much diehard anti Tories like Rochdale may hope there is
It would be insane for both Scotland and the rest of the UK but with Boris as PM it's possible....
He has already cast off Northern Ireland. Protestations about Boris being a unionist have no value when he is delivering anti-union policies. Nor am I obsessed by minutiae poll movements like the Essicks Massiv - this is a long game and the government dilute the arguments for staying every single day.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
The PB Ultras want to partition Scotland, incarcerate the traitorous SNP and send gunboats up the Forth at dawn. And they still won’t be happy…
Partition of Scotland sounds no worse than your partition of the UK. Let the people decide. If the people of Glasgow want to believe in the fiction of Scotland that the SNP cook up let them go independent. If the people of the Borders or Shetland want to remain in UK then let the people decide.
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Or the SNP will become like the ANC in South Africa. The victors of independence not working for their people, but getting voted in continuously anyway ...
What happens to the SNP if it doesn’t achieve independence? Seems an alternative and interesting question
They are like the Earl of Bruce’s spider
Indeed. We’ll try, try and try again, until we win.
Scots only need to win once. The BritNats need to win every time. This is only going to end one way.
(Charles, at the time of the spider story he was already king.)
No you will not because the UK government will not allow you to.
2014 was a once in a generation vote and you will not get another until a generation has elapsed since then if ever.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Act 1998 anyway
*Your* UK government will (foolishly) not allow Scots to express their free will at the ballot box. Another UK government will.
At this moment in time I think Sturgeon will be the one having second thoughts as independence popularity wanes and Scots fear for their pensions
Question. As pensions were not under threat in 2014 does that mean that Liar plans to play politics with people's pensions as you suggest?
Does not the apparent willingness of the supposed UK government to blackmail Scotland just make it obvious why every day that goes past strengthens the case that the Union must come to an end?
No
You accept that the UK government now threaten pensions as a hostage where previous Tory government wouldn't stoop that low though.
What exactly are you talking about? Even in the last referendum the British Government definitely wasn't committed to paying Scottish pensioners their state pension forever...
Owen has been all over the shop the past couple of weeks...even accusing Galloway of being old school right winger...
Owen certainly has it in for Sir Keir. But I can't work out if the antipathy is wholly real, or he's out for revenge on those who mocked and taunted him when Jezza imploded.
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
There is a snippet in Labour pollster Deborah Mattinson's book, Beyond the Red Wall, about pet-owners in focus groups: "dog people often share their beloved pet's name and breed, cat people boast about how many cats they have".
Lol some wanker from the WHO wants vaccinated populations to keep social distancing and masks. Fuck off mate.
Saw a gleeful tweet from a former associate this morning saying he was happy to be "double masked and double vaxxed" on the Tube with the hashtag #zerocovid.
Needless to say his entire feed is retweets of Pagel and other indy SAGE members and he's been calling for restrictions to be tightened for a few weeks now.
Some people just want us to live like this forever and to hell with the consequences. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 18 months at the weekend and she's noticeably less mobile from not being able to get out and about just to do the shopping. It was quite upsetting to see.
If you know where he lives, do me a favour and go round and kick him in the bollocks for me. The smug tool.
Jason Groves @JasonGroves1 · 5m Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
Except:
- he said very similar things before the last time;
- this morning he also said: that some “extra precautions” may be needed after 19 July
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
That's fair enough, but there is a problem with it: what if Boris isn't Conservative leader or PM by that time? It would be easy for him to step down for a.n.other leader to take over - even better if it is unforced. After all, we've had three Conservative PMs in a row, all winning at GEs (sometimes only just): Cameron, May, Johnson.
I can see Johnson rapidly getting bored of the job - especially as Covid has overtaken everything and affected his personally. It's possible he sees Brexit mostly done, Covid over with, and then steps aside 'for his health'. Even better if he gets to choose his successor ...
As an aside, I also quite like Starmer. well, not like. Admire. When he became an MP, my assumption was that his previous position as DPP would be a poison chalice that would cause scandals. It hasn't happened. That impresses me. But he does seem a personality-free zone.
So the two are opposites: Starmer: tidy, workmanlike, but fiercely dull. Johnson: messy, lazy but exciting. Neither appears to have much of a personal political philosophy.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
From today there are also things we need to do very differently. And one of the most important is to change our thinking around what cases in the Bailiwick means. We’ve associated it with hospitalisation, with deaths, with the potential for health services to be overwhelmed. We’ve justified what are really very strict and quite extreme travel restrictions because of those risks. But the risk profile has changed with more than 70% of entire population having had at least one dose. The data shows a full vaccination affords 95% protection against needing hospital care. Younger age-groups are significantly less vulnerable and already far less likely to become very ill and need hospital care. No, it’s not completely risk-free, it never will be no matter what we do. But it is a big change compared to the risk we faced before the vaccine. And as we no longer face the same levels of risk, we can no longer justify the same levels of restrictions. It’s simply not proportionate and not necessary. But in removing the restrictions that we can no longer justify, we must also ask our community not to be complacent. It’s time to start learning to live with COVID, and if we do so responsibly, we can finally begin to regain some of the lost freedoms that COVID has cost us. And that should be cause for celebration.
I sincerely hope my niece will be able to visit her mother in Alderney. My sister needs someone to support her.
If she's double jabbed and is coming from the CTA there are no restrictions & no testing.
She is and is. Thought that was the case, but thanks. Bit of luck, and assuming Aurigny are flying, the rest of my sisters children will be able to visit her. Not sure, for other reasons, that I will.
They each would need to complete one of these before travel:
Aurigny is now flying a much increased schedule - from 2 flights a week to Gatwick to several per day. Although ironically the first arrivals on "open borders" day were delayed by fog!
Thanks again. Gatwick now, I see; used only to be Southampton.
And disruptions due to weather were common when I was going to Alderney quite often.
They've just re-started Southampton to Alderney direct flights with the change in border policy - no longer any need to go via Guernsey
I went on one of those once. Proper old banger of a 14 seater plane and we landed perpendicular to the runway because of the wind direction. Great fun.
My family's summer holiday in early August is in Jersey. Encouraging noises from down that way. The weather just needs to perk up a bit.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Serendipitous timing, what with the by-election today! And it is doubleplusgood news because it sounds like the Tories are delivering proper, skilled jobs of the sort that have been disappearing for decades.
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Or the SNP will become like the ANC in South Africa. The victors of independence not working for their people, but getting voted in continuously anyway ...
What happens to the SNP if it doesn’t achieve independence? Seems an alternative and interesting question
They are like the Earl of Bruce’s spider
Indeed. We’ll try, try and try again, until we win.
Scots only need to win once. The BritNats need to win every time. This is only going to end one way.
(Charles, at the time of the spider story he was already king.)
No you will not because the UK government will not allow you to.
2014 was a once in a generation vote and you will not get another until a generation has elapsed since then if ever.
Union matters are reserved to Westminster under the Scotland Act 1998 anyway
*Your* UK government will (foolishly) not allow Scots to express their free will at the ballot box. Another UK government will.
At this moment in time I think Sturgeon will be the one having second thoughts as independence popularity wanes and Scots fear for their pensions
Question. As pensions were not under threat in 2014 does that mean that Liar plans to play politics with people's pensions as you suggest?
Does not the apparent willingness of the supposed UK government to blackmail Scotland just make it obvious why every day that goes past strengthens the case that the Union must come to an end?
The only reason "pensions were not under threat in 2014" is that the Scottish government were clear that they would be paying pensions.
Now for some bizarre reason nationalists want the union to pay pensions. There's a simple solution if you want that: stay in the union.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
Boris isn't like Blair though. I think Blair still relied on being seen to be on the side of the angels, so his downfall when the disillusionment came was that much more precipitous. Johnson is much more akin to Berlusconi as far as I can see. People indulge him, no transgression (even criminal investigations) seemed to dent Berlusconi's overall popularity, and he had that annoying knack of being able to bounce back after what would have been career ending disasters for any other politician.
Nissan confirm they are to build a 1 billion pound car battery factory in Sunderland
Absolutely coincidental that this announced on by Election Day
I hadn't thought about that but if so good politics
The BBC also says that 'The government is contributing to the cost of the expansion, but a precise figure has not been disclosed.'
Ion other words, a massive handout. Some might call it a bribe.
I am sorry but investing in the future green economy is essential and is actively promoted by all governments
All governments recently signed a “level playing field” treaty, but one of the signatories was crossing their fingers behind their back. Guess which one.
The EU are over and the UK will decide on investments and jobs
Investment decisions will surely be based on access to markets into which to sell, so the EU is not over. It's just that the relationship and dependency is different.
The EU dictating UK investment decisions to the UK government is over
Bollocks. Your BritNat government just signed a “level playing field” treaty that explicitly says the exact opposite.
Maggie must be spinning in her grave that her party has morphed into the party of big government, state subsidy and picking winners. It’ll end in tears… for the taxpayers.
Creating jobs and green investments will end in 'tears' of joy for the taxpayers not pain
So you think civil servants and politicians are best placed to decide what companies produce stuff. Governments should be creating strategic policies (eg for green investment) they should not be perverting the market or deciding who gets the business by giving subsidies. I can't believe a Tory believes this. Why not go the whole hog and nationalise it?
Civil servants and politicians should not be allowed anywhere near business decisions. They bugger it up every time they interfere.
The difference is that there is a political will to move the green agenda faster than the market would led to its own devices
Absolutely, but that should be by strategic decisions that the Govt has control over (eg infrastructure) and not subsidising individual businesses.
Out there could be an entrepreneur at the forefront of producing batteries that are better and cheaper. He currently employs 20 engineers, but will become the Bill Gates of the green revolution employing 10s of thousands of UK employees. His first big deal is Nissan because his batteries are better and cheaper.
But no someone in Whitehall who has never heard of him gives £100m to Nissan snuffing him out at birth.
The Battery industry really isn't IT...
It was an analogy. Pick any world leading entrepreneur of your choice.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
Labour’s problems are way beyond Starmer. What is their offering? What are they selling that is so different to the Tories that it’s worth taking a punt on a party that elected a terrorist-hugging Marxist as a leader, very recently?
The Tories are now peddling quasi-socialist economics - everyone is, around the world, it’s like a war. Keynes is back
Labour can only offer more of the same, but with the added toxicity of their ID politics
‘Vote Labour! We are the same as the Tories but unlike them we also think you’re racist scum’
‘And we think people with penises are often women’
Cricket is having its Moneyball moment When Twenty20 launched, the game of cricket changed forever. Now a team of data evangelists are taking the sport to the next level
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
Probably deliberate. Stephenson is involved in an Academy, which gives him a natural route to bringing the Batley Grammar issue up on the doorstep. But it is probably not the sort of thing he wants to talk about that often when it comes to the media, for fear of making a lot of the Muslim vote stick with Labour. Far better to let Galloway and Leadbitter scrap it out.
I'm surprised there has not been much discussion on here about the impact of the Batley Grammar issue on the vote. I would imagine it will play a big factor both for the Muslim vote and the WWC / Heavy Woollen contingent.
SKS is reaping the reward of having voted for the government consistently throughout the pandemic. Was it in the national interest? No. His line should have been anything the govt does in covid handling we could do better. But that ship has sailed and people can't see the point of Labour.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
Probably deliberate. Stephenson is involved in an Academy, which gives him a natural route to bringing the Batley Grammar issue up on the doorstep. But it is probably not the sort of thing he wants to talk about that often when it comes to the media, for fear of making a lot of the Muslim vote stick with Labour. Far better to let Galloway and Leadbitter scrap it out.
I'm surprised there has not been much discussion on here about the impact of the Batley Grammar issue on the vote. I would imagine it will play a big factor both for the Muslim vote and the WWC / Heavy Woollen contingent.
Absolutely fucking disgraceful incident. That poor teacher is still in hiding
For all his faults Macron stands up for French values in the face of these Islamist scum. We cower. Craven
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
Labour’s problems are way beyond Starmer. What is their offering? What are they selling that is so different to the Tories that it’s worth taking a punt on a party that elected a terrorist-hugging Marxist as a leader, very recently?
The Tories are now peddling quasi-socialist economics - everyone is, around the world, it’s like a war. Keynes is back
Labour can only offer more of the same, but with the added toxicity of their ID politics
‘Vote Labour! We are the same as the Tories but unlike them we also think you’re racist scum’
‘And we think people with penises are often women’
Ha - I was just trying to come up with a way of making the same point. Except it wasn't as succinct.
Those willing to consider voting Conservative don't, as @Nigel_Foremain suggested earlier, venerate Boris. They may find him amusing, but that doesn't translate him being their ideal Prime Minister. They just prefer him to the alternative, for the reasons Leon neatly sets out above.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Cricket is having its Moneyball moment When Twenty20 launched, the game of cricket changed forever. Now a team of data evangelists are taking the sport to the next level
The decision to allow 60,000 fans to attend the Euro 2020 semi-finals and finals at Wembley is “a recipe for disaster”, a committee of MEPs has said, urging a rethink because of the surging number of coronavirus cases in the UK.
The European parliament’s committee on public health wants Uefa and the British government to reconsider their decision to allow Wembley to host the matches at 75% of its 90,000 capacity.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
Labour’s problems are way beyond Starmer. What is their offering? What are they selling that is so different to the Tories that it’s worth taking a punt on a party that elected a terrorist-hugging Marxist as a leader, very recently?
The Tories are now peddling quasi-socialist economics - everyone is, around the world, it’s like a war. Keynes is back
Labour can only offer more of the same, but with the added toxicity of their ID politics
‘Vote Labour! We are the same as the Tories but unlike them we also think you’re racist scum’
‘And we think people with penises are often women’
Ha - I was just trying to come up with a way of making the same point. Except it wasn't as succinct.
Those willing to consider voting Conservative don't, as @Nigel_Foremain suggested earlier, venerate Boris. They may find him amusing, but that doesn't translate him being their ideal Prime Minister. They just prefer him to the alternative, for the reasons Leon neatly sets out above.
Though those who underestimate him neglect to understand that many do genuinely like Boris - or understand why they do.
Boris consistently has high gross approval ratings, much higher than Cameron had at this stage of the 2010-15 Parliament.
The decision to allow 60,000 fans to attend the Euro 2020 semi-finals and finals at Wembley is “a recipe for disaster”, a committee of MEPs has said, urging a rethink because of the surging number of coronavirus cases in the UK.
The European parliament’s committee on public health wants Uefa and the British government to reconsider their decision to allow Wembley to host the matches at 75% of its 90,000 capacity.
"a committee of MEPs " Lol
Aaaaand, nobody cares what MEPs say. Even in euroland
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
It's a risky one though, unlike C&A which felt like one of those golden tips that seemed right: thank you again, Mike: your tip paid for my day at Wimbledon yesterday among many other things!
Peak Boris was May 25th. There is a discernible and definite shift now.
The one thing which might lift the Conservatives back is if England win Euro 2020 in front of a full house at Wembley. Otherwise the tide has turned.
You may be right but the polling evidence really is not there for such a claim. The government has had a rough week or so and the press is hostile but these kind of things often flare up only to fizzle out again. All we need is a Grauniead - ' the day the polls turned' and we head back to square one.
What never fizzles out is Tory sleaze. The events of the last week fit into a recognisable pattern going back many decades.
What the Tories need is a generation of nice people. Good, honest, competent, straightforward, pleasant folk with no “side”. When one looks at the coming generation of young Tories one sees the exact opposite. Tory sleaze is going to be around for at least a half century to come.
No sleaze in the SNP thankfully. Salmond and Sturgeon say Hi..
Sleaze comes when a party is so long in power that they think that they can get away with anything and still get elected.
People like @Big_G_NorthWales will vote for a donkey with a blue rosette, and in Scotland will vote SNP until independence. Only after that will Scottish politics return to competitive parties.
The SNP will wither away post-independence. I, and many other members, will leave and help build new, normal parties. Our goal is for Scotland to be a normal country.
Yes, I think that until there is independence the SNP with all its many faults and infighting will dominate Scotland. Afterwards it can safely be dissolved, into rival parties, and more functional politics.
One party states are not good, whether SNP in Holyrood, Labour in Cardiff, DUP in Stormont or Tory in Westminster. They all generate sleaze when hegemonic.
!
And Drakeford’s Welsh Labour does not seem to be as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was when it had hegemony.
Drakeford himself is unassuming, but the grip Welsh Labour has on public life in Wales is way more arrogant & sleazy than anything in Westminster.
Llafur have run Wales as a one-party state since 1999, to no apparent benefit to anyone apart from themselves. They have prospered while the Welsh are fed on scraps.
If Llafur is not as "as entitled, arrogant and sleazy as Scottish Labour once was", then SLAB must have been really something special in terms of semi-criminal organisations.
Oh, it was. It fostered George Galloway for a start. And there are plenty more repulsive mafioso deep in the sewers of SLAB history.
I don’t think anyone in England or Wales can conceive just how vicious and filthy Scottish Labour had become by the last quarter of the 20th century. You had to be there. I was and saw it with my own eyes.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
Doubly interesting, In that he seems to be in favour of a "liberal free society". So go Lib Dem, eh!!! Whatever we do, we need to steer clear of the authoritarian political parties - Conservative, Labour and Green Party.
If he should happen to be elected, will he stand up against the corrupt, and even criminal, control freaks who form the current government? There could be some turbulence ahead - or is he just saying it for effect?
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
If the price was right would you accept an offer from someone for one of your bedrooms?
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
Doubly interesting, In that he seems to be in favour of a "liberal free society". So go Lib Dem, eh!!! Whatever we do, we need to steer clear of the authoritarian political parties - Conservative, Labour and Green Party.
If he should happen to be elected, will he stand up against the corrupt, and even criminal, control freaks who form the current government? There could be some turbulence ahead - or is he just saying it for effect?
It would be great if the Liberal Democrats could actually stand up for liberalism. Or democracy.
Instead their name is about as truthful as that of the Holy Roman Empire.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
If the price was right would you accept an offer from someone for one of your bedrooms?
I'd have to discuss it with my wife, but if the price is right I couldn't see why not.
Plenty of people make money doing things like that with AirBnB etc don't they?
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
I’m watching the excellent Rebellion on Netflix, a drama about the Irish revolution and civil war. It didn’t do very well in the ratings, I suspect because it is brilliantly ambivalent. For once the Brits are not all evil. And the Irish aren’t all heroes.
Some of them are so intensely duplicitous you can’t work out which side they are on. It’s great
What it also shows is that Irish politics - north and south - has been drenched in hypocrisy for centuries. The Irish wanted independence yet they enslaved themselves to a cruel church? And now they are a tax parasite run from Brussels. The British were all about democracy and saving Europe from the Hun yet they sent in criminals to rape Irish women - exactly what they accused the Kaiser of doing in Belgium
Irish politics is horribly complex and fraught, however, so maybe hypocrisy and fudge is necessary, to avoid deeper violence. The EU needs to learn this. Only a fudge, a legalistic hypocrisy, will keep the peace.
It’s not like the EU is allergic to political fudges. It’s basically what they DO
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
That's not fair. The DUP did say yes to Brexit.
That was just them saying no to the EU though, wasn't it?
When it came time to choose a form of Brexit they rejected every option.
The reason Curtice says “the Indy argument is cooling” is precisely because of brexit. It is never ending, complex, full of contradictions and it is playing out in front of everyone.
How the SNP argues the same doesn’t happen with Indy (on a larger scale) is one for them to answer.
They argue it is worth it. I dont agree, but it can be done.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
If the price was right would you accept an offer from someone for one of your bedrooms?
I'd have to discuss it with my wife, but if the price is right I couldn't see why not.
Plenty of people make money doing things like that with AirBnB etc don't they?
Good for you. I know you aren't a hypocrite and it's good to see you put that into practice.
For the right price absolutely nothing wrong with selling parts of your home to other people. Same principle with the UK in your view.
Rishi clearly smells blood in the water as he's been on the gram with a new puppy. That looks like the opening salvo in a leadership bid and an attempt to make him look relatable and less like a billionaire trapped in a schoolboy's body. Obviously no rescue dog for Mr 12 Houses though. Pedigree only.
Being relatable is overrated. People dont need to think you relate to them, just that you might understand them and do something for them. Some curious people pass or fail that test.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
That's not fair. The DUP did say yes to Brexit.
That was just them saying no to the EU though, wasn't it?
When it came time to choose a form of Brexit they rejected every option.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
A very rare sighting of the Tory candidate by the sounds of things.
Probably deliberate. Stephenson is involved in an Academy, which gives him a natural route to bringing the Batley Grammar issue up on the doorstep. But it is probably not the sort of thing he wants to talk about that often when it comes to the media, for fear of making a lot of the Muslim vote stick with Labour. Far better to let Galloway and Leadbitter scrap it out.
I'm surprised there has not been much discussion on here about the impact of the Batley Grammar issue on the vote. I would imagine it will play a big factor both for the Muslim vote and the WWC / Heavy Woollen contingent.
FWIW it wasn't mentioned in any of the hours of phone calls I had - nor were Palestine or gays. By contrast, local service cuts and who was responsible (opinions differed!) came up a lot, plus the personalities of the candidates.
‘Ed Sheeran has described Joe Biden’s evacuation of Afghanistan as a dereliction of American duty after a sell out performance of Lego House on Twitch’
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
I’m watching the excellent Rebellion on Netflix, a drama about the Irish revolution and civil war. It didn’t do very well in the ratings, I suspect because it is brilliantly ambivalent. For once the Brits are not all evil. And the Irish aren’t all heroes.
Some of them are so intensely duplicitous you can’t work out which side they are on. It’s great
What it also shows is that Irish politics - north and south - has been drenched in hypocrisy for centuries. The Irish wanted independence yet they enslaved themselves to a cruel church? And now they are a tax parasite run from Brussels. The British were all about democracy and saving Europe from the Hun yet they sent in criminals to rape Irish women - exactly what they accused the Kaiser of doing in Belgium
Irish politics is horribly complex and fraught, however, so maybe hypocrisy and fudge is necessary, to avoid deeper violence. The EU needs to learn this. Only a fudge, a legalistic hypocrisy, will keep the peace.
It’s not like the EU is allergic to political fudges. It’s basically what they DO
Indeed. Who cares if NI has the same rules as GB, England, Ireland or their own unique rules? They voted for devolution and they can control whether the Protocol stays or goes.
Rochdale wants some zealous religious purity test rather than a solution that works. I want a fudge that works and then move on and stop worrying about NI - and let NI voters decide for themselves.
I vote for a Tory MP and I expect that MP in Parliament to be prioritising our interests they're elected to represent. NI voters have chosen to ostracise themselves from GB - for all the DUPs pretensions that they're "British" they don't stand for or vote for British parties. So let them sort themselves out, I don't care.
Hmm, it's not immediately obvious to me that linking the Union Jack with the taxes Welsh people have to pay is entirely optimal cross-branding by the UK government...
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
I think the Tories got almost 3-4% in a NI seat not that long ago.
Amusing, but Id say encouraging they bothered to stand. Theyd probably not do well, and some have 'sibling' parties there, but I'd like to see the national parties stand. As it is they are GB not UK parties, other than, IDK, UKIP previously and technically the tories.
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
I’m watching the excellent Rebellion on Netflix, a drama about the Irish revolution and civil war. It didn’t do very well in the ratings, I suspect because it is brilliantly ambivalent. For once the Brits are not all evil. And the Irish aren’t all heroes.
Some of them are so intensely duplicitous you can’t work out which side they are on. It’s great
What it also shows is that Irish politics - north and south - has been drenched in hypocrisy for centuries. The Irish wanted independence yet they enslaved themselves to a cruel church? And now they are a tax parasite run from Brussels. The British were all about democracy and saving Europe from the Hun yet they sent in criminals to rape Irish women - exactly what they accused the Kaiser of doing in Belgium
Irish politics is horribly complex and fraught, however, so maybe hypocrisy and fudge is necessary, to avoid deeper violence. The EU needs to learn this. Only a fudge, a legalistic hypocrisy, will keep the peace.
It’s not like the EU is allergic to political fudges. It’s basically what they DO
Indeed. Who cares if NI has the same rules as GB, England, Ireland or their own unique rules? They voted for devolution and they can control whether the Protocol stays or goes.
Rochdale wants some zealous religious purity test rather than a solution that works. I want a fudge that works and then move on and stop worrying about NI - and let NI voters decide for themselves.
I vote for a Tory MP and I expect that MP in Parliament to be prioritising our interests they're elected to represent. NI voters have chosen to ostracise themselves from GB - for all the DUPs pretensions that they're "British" they don't stand for or vote for British parties. So let them sort themselves out, I don't care.
I do care, they are British. As British as me. And we owe a debt to Ireland, still. We probably always will
However your analysis is correct. The EU weaponised the Irish border to try and bully Britain into a bad Brexit. Their total hypocrisy was exposed when they casually reimposed an Irish-Irish border overnight, to stop vaccine exports, WITHOUT TELLING THE IRISH
They don’t care about Ireland. It’s all fake. They don’t even care about the sanctity of the Single Market, that much. They REALLY wanted Brexit to hurt and be shit because a successful Brexit is an existential threat, long term, to EU integrity
They need to find a conniving politician who will wise up and see that fucking up Ireland is ultimately pointless and self defeating, even if they do still hate Brexit
The problem is the nexus of NI, the EU and United Kingdom leaving is an almost unsolvable problem. How do you have no border between Eire and NI and no border between rUK and NI, but a border between the UK and EU? I don't think there is a solution that's easy. Most in the rUK would I suspect not care much if Ireland re-united, but that should be for the people of NI to decide, just as it is for the people of Scotland to decide if they want to be an independent country and for the people of the UK to decide if they wanted to leave the EU. How you deliver those wishes is hard, as no vote is ever 100 %, and there will always be those who are unhappy.
Indeed, and it shines a light onto the question about priorities. All through the referendum both sides spoke about what was best for the UK. They disagreed on what that was but agreed that the UK was the priority.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
Why should we prioritise the UK? Serious question.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
From an English perspective "why should we prioritise the UK" is a perfectly valid question. Its just that it isn't if you are the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
Its a perfectly valid question if you are the Prime Minister. Since we live in a democracy the Prime Minister has to try to ensure that at the next election they win 326+ MPs in Westminster.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
I think the Tories got almost 3-4% in a NI seat not that long ago.
Amusing, but Id say encouraging they bothered to stand. Theyd probably not do well, and some have 'sibling' parties there, but I'd like to see the national parties stand. As it is they are GB not UK parties, other than, IDK, UKIP previously and technically the tories.
The Tories and the UUP used to be brothers, as the Lib Dems and the Alliance still are. Labour and the SDLP had some kind of connection also.
It was the rise of the DUP / Sinn Fein co-hegemony that screwed all that.
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
To an extent, that's always been the case- Maggie was unassailable until she started to believe her own hype. Something similar happened to Cameron.
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
Labour’s problems are way beyond Starmer. What is their offering? What are they selling that is so different to the Tories that it’s worth taking a punt on a party that elected a terrorist-hugging Marxist as a leader, very recently?
The Tories are now peddling quasi-socialist economics - everyone is, around the world, it’s like a war. Keynes is back
Labour can only offer more of the same, but with the added toxicity of their ID politics
‘Vote Labour! We are the same as the Tories but unlike them we also think you’re racist scum’
‘And we think people with penises are often women’
Starmer's offer on behalf of Labour is to be the anti-Johnson: honesty, competence and moral purpose. Whether enough people buy the offer is another matter. Which brings me onto ...
BBC news going big on Nissan and now Boris being interviewed, complete with Nissan branded jacket sporting 'prime minister'
He really knows how to speak to his red wall voters, and create fury with his opponents
Thats why he is hated so much on here, he is feared as a political opponent.
No, it is because he is a twat and an embarrassment.
Isn't that what you want in a political opponent? That would surely make him so much easier to beat.
One would have thought so if one believed the electorate had a decent choice. The problem at the last GE, as I have said before was the choice was between dumb and dumber and the electorate chose dumb. Fanbois of Johnson do crack me up though. They actually believe in him! He must be pissing himself.
I think the problem many opponents of Johnson have is that, in their dislike of him, they miss his appeal. They hate him, and therefore everyone else must as well. I mean, what's wrong with the voters? This sort of thinking is why so many of their attacks fail.
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
The point is, honesty, competence and moral purpose isn't important to many people. I might find that reprehensible but it is what it is.
Comments
Brexit, and the way it has played out, may ironically prove to be the saviour of the Union
Personally, I quite like Boris Johnson; he has a certain appeal, and is *different* to other politicians - which again, can be appealing. Then again, I like our postman, but wouldn't want him to be PM. (I did not vote Conservative at 2019 GE.)
Boris is different to most other politicians, and attacks that would floor other politicians leave him unscathed. His opponents need to find a way to counter that - and fast.
And there is hope - "Teflon Tony's" coating eventually wore off: but much of that was his own doing, not his opponents'.
"I would imagine he’d probably appreciate having the time and the privacy to do that" (hiding)
https://order-order.com/2021/07/01/watch-labours-leadbeater-slammed-by-ryan-stephenson-for-claiming-grammar-school-row-has-been-resolved-when-teacher-is-still-in-hiding/
Out there could be an entrepreneur at the forefront of producing batteries that are better and cheaper. He currently employs 20 engineers, but will become the Bill Gates of the green revolution employing 10s of thousands of UK employees. His first big deal is Nissan because his batteries are better and cheaper.
But no someone in Whitehall who has never heard of him gives £100m to Nissan snuffing him out at birth.
@JasonGroves1
·
5m
Boris Johnson all but confirms July 19 reopening is on. Says it is 'ever clearer' that Covid vaccines have broken the link between infections and deaths, adding: 'That gives us the scope, we think, to go ahead on the 19th, cautiously and irreversibly'
My suspicion is that the person to blame is Simon Cowell. We have raise at least one generation who don't want to do the kind of work that is available because its beneath them and anyway they're really talented or whatever.
Before anyone asks. I have worked in a call centre. I have worked in a warehouse. I have worked in a food factory slicing cucumbers all day. I have stacked shelves in a supermarket. I have done night shifts. All honest work that (for the time) payed decently.
I don’t think anyone in England or Wales can conceive just how vicious and filthy Scottish Labour had become by the last quarter of the 20th century. You had to be there. I was and saw it with my own eyes.
Now everybody is on instanta seeing the lives of the rich and famous, and all the faker influencers telling you that you can have this if you just do (insert get rich quick scheme).
So far too many people think all I need to do is make it on YouTube, Twitch, Instanta....I don't need that boring night shift job.
Novara Media
@novaramedia
·
3h
Owen Jones argues that should Labour lose #BatleyandSpen, Starmer must resign.
"This has been an experiment in a leadership having no vision whatsoever." #TyskySour
https://twitter.com/novaramedia/status/1410518247137591296
What's slightly different about Boris is that the flaws were obvious before he even became PM. They were also obvious during 2020, hence the steady fall for his party over the year.
Therefore, Labour might as well stick with Starmer. Yes, he got less than nowhere in the first half of 2020, but it's not obvious that anyone else would have done any better. And I stick to my theory that, when we have collectively had our fill of BoJo (5 years, plus or minus 5 years), someone boring, hard-working and... Starmer-like will be just the ticket, rather than a left-wing gob on a stick.
There may be a vaccine, but delivery isn't expected until at least 2023. And even then, huge numbers will still refuse that vaccine. They either don't get BDS, or if they do, the symptoms don't stop them from getting on with their lives, even as some over-educated ABC's whine like a mozzie after dusk....
Huge eight-storey Union Jack to be stuck on Cardiff city centre tax office
https://twitter.com/cardiffonline/status/1410258574941462533?s=20
P.S. Any other crossword fans find it fitting that the high priestess of the zerocovidians is an avid fan of Love Island? (love being a synonym for zero, island a cue for Britain).
‘The British people won’t vote for a fucking Borrower’
… still makes me chuckle, several times a week
What I had not realised was that Spen Valley was the consituency of Sir John Simon and thus is effectively the home of the Liberal Nationals.
"Leadbeater wouldn’t say she wanted the teacher back in school because she knows Galloway would hoover up her voters if she said that, many of whom don’t want him back in school. If Labour candidates won’t stand up for a liberal free society they deserve to lose"
Quite
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-57677646.amp
Except:
- he said very similar things before the last time;
- this morning he also said: that some “extra precautions” may be needed after 19 July
Summer dazzles with stillness
Two dildos are Knapped
I can see Johnson rapidly getting bored of the job - especially as Covid has overtaken everything and affected his personally. It's possible he sees Brexit mostly done, Covid over with, and then steps aside 'for his health'. Even better if he gets to choose his successor ...
As an aside, I also quite like Starmer. well, not like. Admire. When he became an MP, my assumption was that his previous position as DPP would be a poison chalice that would cause scandals. It hasn't happened. That impresses me. But he does seem a personality-free zone.
So the two are opposites: Starmer: tidy, workmanlike, but fiercely dull. Johnson: messy, lazy but exciting. Neither appears to have much of a personal political philosophy.
I won't vote for either of them ...
LBW: Reviewed, not out.
LBW: Reviewed, three red lights. Review lost.
LBW: Reviewed, three red lights. Review lost.
6-2 end of second over and Sri Lanka have no reviews left.
Now even as a former supporter of Corbyn's, two times is surely enough to convince anyone that the man can't win and his politics isn't wanted.
My family's summer holiday in early August is in Jersey. Encouraging noises from down that way. The weather just needs to perk up a bit.
Now for some bizarre reason nationalists want the union to pay pensions. There's a simple solution if you want that: stay in the union.
So whatever kind of Brexit we then looked at should have put the best interests of the UK at the centre of things. How to square off the Irish Border issue was obvious - depart the EU with a continuation deal so that we become Norway or Switzerland or even Turkey - maintain sufficient agreement that the border is not a problem.
May chose not to do that, which left the NI backstop as the solution. Yes it restricts our room to maneuver based on our other decision but preserves the UK at the centre of the deal.
What we have now is a UK Prime Minister who has no interest in the UK as there is no longer a UK from a customs and trading perspective. You said that people in the rUK don't care about NI and that is patently correct as look what their government has done with the backing and support.
It isn't just NI either as the row over Scotland shows. The priority for the UK government is England, and if that means an end to the Union as we already have defacto then so what. So the debate isn't even about Brexit any more, its about the Union. Quite how the clown gets himself out of this self-made trap I don't know. On one hand throw NI out of the union against their will, on the other hand refuse to even consider letting Scotland do what they voted for.
The Scots have voted for devolution. So have the Welsh and NI. They get to decide for themselves what they want while the English can't.
Why shouldn't the English say "this is what we want" and NI or anyone else can either like it or lump it?
If NI choose to vote for Sinn Fein who don't bother to turn up to Parliament, or the DUP who just say No! No! No! to everything then why shouldn't English MPs prioritise England over NI? What is wrong with that?
The Tories are now peddling quasi-socialist economics - everyone is, around the world, it’s like a war. Keynes is back
Labour can only offer more of the same, but with the added toxicity of their ID politics
‘Vote Labour! We are the same as the Tories but unlike them we also think you’re racist scum’
‘And we think people with penises are often women’
When Twenty20 launched, the game of cricket changed forever. Now a team of data evangelists are taking the sport to the next level
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cricviz-twenty20-cricket-data
It will send you straight to your NHS apps and under the table.
I'm surprised there has not been much discussion on here about the impact of the Batley Grammar issue on the vote. I would imagine it will play a big factor both for the Muslim vote and the WWC / Heavy Woollen contingent.
For all his faults Macron stands up for French values in the face of these Islamist scum. We cower. Craven
Those willing to consider voting Conservative don't, as @Nigel_Foremain suggested earlier, venerate Boris. They may find him amusing, but that doesn't translate him being their ideal Prime Minister. They just prefer him to the alternative, for the reasons Leon neatly sets out above.
You and I agree that the union in its current form isn't sustainable, yet the PM and his government insist that it is. How they act though just proves both of us right that it isn't.
Any unionist worth their salts should be outraged that you need an export license to send products from one part of the UK to another. As most of them seem to be cheering it on it is just another example of their hypocrisy that I keep calling out.
The European parliament’s committee on public health wants Uefa and the British government to reconsider their decision to allow Wembley to host the matches at 75% of its 90,000 capacity.
"a committee of MEPs " Lol
Boris consistently has high gross approval ratings, much higher than Cameron had at this stage of the 2010-15 Parliament.
Due to the way the Northern Irish choose to vote the PM currently has zero MPs in Northern Ireland, zero target seats in Northern Ireland. The range of MPs he could get in Northern Ireland at the next election has a lower bound of zero, an upper bound of zero and a mean, median and mode average of zero.
If the Northern Irish wish to be an integral part of the union, then voting as an integral part of the union for the national parties would be a good starting point.
I don't think there's a chance Sri Lanka are going to make the 50 overs.
If he should happen to be elected, will he stand up against the corrupt, and even criminal, control freaks who form the current government? There could be some turbulence ahead - or is he just saying it for effect?
Dead leaves fall
on the haiku factory
In silence.
Instead their name is about as truthful as that of the Holy Roman Empire.
Plenty of people make money doing things like that with AirBnB etc don't they?
Some of them are so intensely duplicitous you can’t work out which side they are on. It’s great
What it also shows is that Irish politics - north and south - has been drenched in hypocrisy for centuries. The Irish wanted independence yet they enslaved themselves to a cruel church? And now they are a tax parasite run from Brussels. The British were all about democracy and saving Europe from the Hun yet they sent in criminals to rape Irish women - exactly what they accused the Kaiser of doing in Belgium
Irish politics is horribly complex and fraught, however, so maybe hypocrisy and fudge is necessary, to avoid deeper violence. The EU needs to learn this. Only a fudge, a legalistic hypocrisy, will keep the peace.
It’s not like the EU is allergic to political fudges. It’s basically what they DO
When it came time to choose a form of Brexit they rejected every option.
For the right price absolutely nothing wrong with selling parts of your home to other people. Same principle with the UK in your view.
Let us know what your wife says.
‘Andy Murray has described the government’s 1% pay rise for NHS workers as risible after winning a tense five-set victory at Wimbledon yesterday’
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1410579093104513024?s=21
‘Ed Sheeran has described Joe Biden’s evacuation of Afghanistan as a dereliction of American duty after a sell out performance of Lego House on Twitch’
Shut up, Andy
Rochdale wants some zealous religious purity test rather than a solution that works. I want a fudge that works and then move on and stop worrying about NI - and let NI voters decide for themselves.
I vote for a Tory MP and I expect that MP in Parliament to be prioritising our interests they're elected to represent. NI voters have chosen to ostracise themselves from GB - for all the DUPs pretensions that they're "British" they don't stand for or vote for British parties. So let them sort themselves out, I don't care.
Symbolically interesting, at least.
Amusing, but Id say encouraging they bothered to stand. Theyd probably not do well, and some have 'sibling' parties there, but I'd like to see the national parties stand. As it is they are GB not UK parties, other than, IDK, UKIP previously and technically the tories.
It is astonishing how many open goals Keir and his team let through every day of the week.
However your analysis is correct. The EU weaponised the Irish border to try and bully Britain into a bad Brexit. Their total hypocrisy was exposed when they casually reimposed an Irish-Irish border overnight, to stop vaccine exports, WITHOUT TELLING THE IRISH
They don’t care about Ireland. It’s all fake. They don’t even care about the sanctity of the Single Market, that much. They REALLY wanted Brexit to hurt and be shit because a successful Brexit is an existential threat, long term, to EU integrity
They need to find a conniving politician who will wise up and see that fucking up Ireland is ultimately pointless and self defeating, even if they do still hate Brexit
It was the rise of the DUP / Sinn Fein co-hegemony that screwed all that.
B&S isn't that far from me and I'd be spending the day in the constituency trying to knock up as many voters as I could.
As well as providing excellent intel for betting purposes.