I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
Is this person arguing in favour of the UK being self-sufficient in food?
The key question is whether UKG is in favour of self sufficiency in food. Their actions suggest otherwise, as they prioritise imports over home production. Which is what this person is saying.
I don't think it's remotely possible for the UK to be self sufficient in food. It's not a question of what anyone is in favour of, it's a question of reality.
OK. To reiterate my point. UKG by its actions is making the UK less sufficient in food by prioritising imports over home production.
Why is that a bad thing?
Was it a bad thing we were less sufficient in coal?
It isn't necessarily a bad thing if you believe immigration is bad per se, and less important than maintaining home industries. But the consequence of restricting the means to profitably produce food at market prices, while you don't restrict imports of competitor products, is to see imports replace home production.
I don't think immigration is bad whatsoever. I support as much high-skilled, high-wage immigration as possible.
I think immigration for minimum wage jobs, deflating our economy and driving up costs combined with giving those who come here for minimum wages jobs housing benefit, universal credit etc because minimum wage isn't enough to live in this nation is bad. Don't you?
I don't think this, no. Because it ignores market reality. Not an expert, but I don't think slaughtermen were working at minimum wage under FoM anyway.
Actually they were. We had job details being shared here saying that night shifts in an abattoir in South East England were being paid £9.12 per hour.
Do you think its feasible or productive to be working for £9.12 per hour for overnight shifts in South East England? Or to be frank anywhere in the UK.
Glassdoor has average slaughtermen salaries at £31 000, which is about twice minimum wage. I'm sure when you drill down there are big variations. But those apparently reasonably paid jobs will go if we import the products instead, thanks to the government immigration and trade policies.
No they won't, if they're productive they'll stay.
What will go is the £9.12 per hour jobs being advertised.
Do you think its acceptable to expect a night shift job for difficult work to be filled for £9.12 per hour?
Glassdoor really isn't accurate when looking at wages for UK jobs...
I agree, but at least a proportion of people will be paid that. £9 an hour isn't the average salary either. The market forces principle still applies, regardless of what the actual average salary is.
The £9.12ph jobs are now £10.57ph
Yeah but not all jobs are at that rate. The more skilled jobs get paid higher and is the way of the world, those jobs are more likely to be indigenous workers. Abbatoirs will be looking at their wage bill in the round. If the average wage is uncompetitive, all those jobs will go, including the higher paid ones.
That's not true. Some abattoirs will go under, others will increase automation/management practices for the basic tasks, and survive. The idea that we should maintain low wage work for the sake of protecting slightly higher paid jobs is a curious one for the left. It never applies to arguments over the minimum wage strangely.
We don't have enough abattoirs at present even without closures. They're too thinly scattered as it is.
Agreed.
There's a big opportunity for some farm based or even mobile abbatoirs.
Requires us to diverge from some EU regulations, which should imo be a suitable opportunity for this.
Wayne Couzens will keep at least a third of his police pension because rules do not allow him to be stripped of the full amount, The Times has learnt.
Home Office guidelines state that an individual’s pension cannot be forfeited by more than 65 per cent, the amount that relates to the contributions made by the police force and therefore the public purse.
It adds that at least four judges, in separate cases about pensions, concluded that it would be wrong to take the remaining 35 per cent as it represented the officer’s own contributions from their salary. To strip any of that would be a “clear infringement of the officer’s rights” under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Blimey. Stockton South back into toss-up territory? Matt Vickers will have have to do more than social media posts whilst pissed and writing to the Palace of Westminster catering teams to get Parmo on the menu.
TBH to Matt I think he is a decent human being. Its just that punters in Stockton are fickle, they turned out in large numbers to vote for him and expect delivery. He hasn't done much yet.
These constituency results are decidedly mixed for Labour IMO. Good swings in about 20 seats, but some of the others are pretty dismal.
That will be GE 2023 in a nutshell. The Con majority will reduce as Labour take back some seats... but it will be patchy and not enough to deprive the Conservatives of another 4-5 year term
Con majority 30-40? Seems about right to me.
It will mark the beginning of the end of this latest prolonged period of Tory government though IMO.
Mind you still some achievement, only one party has won a general election after ten years in power since universal suffrage in 1918. Major's Tories in 1992
I think it might be what happens to the LDs in the South that swings it against the Conservatives. I suspect even on today's figures in the RedWall, Johnson has the skills to turn those seats back the way of the Conservatives.
If he starts to struggle in the RedWall, Johnson's golden goose is a referendum for the restoration of capital punishment.
Mr. Fishing, got to say I still think automated driving is like flying cars - something technically possible that won't be practical for almost anything.
You get slow burns though. Look at video calls. "Vidphones" were a staple of c20th Sci fi. Then there were 15 years when they were possible via Skype and facetime but nobody saw the point. Then lockdown and kaboom.
Same thing happened with faxes, actually. The technology was there since ww2, the legal profession had them from the 70s, but it took a postal strike in the 80s before they caught on.
Faxes and video calls don't immediately stop you paying for something else, though, except relatively cheap stamps. Automation saves wages. It'll catch on fine.
25 years ago, Acorn did a lot of work on Video-on-Demand technology. Set Top Boxes were needed, as PC graphics cards and processors were generally not powerful enough to decode the video streams.
Apparently there was a certain amount of negativity in the market, because few people saw the possibility that the Internet could handle the traffic from everyone, and the boxes were restricted to certain cable providers.
I could see the Internet having the bandwidth; what I never guessed was that phones would, within a decade, be able to stream videos at high quality. The rate the technology increased at was massive.
But it involved no fundamental new technology; only improvements on what was existing.
People are very bad at accepting the implications of exponential changes.
In this case, the exponential increase in computing power / £ was going to turn available radio bandwidth & video compression from expensive impossibilities to trivialities in single digit years.
You see similar "unpossible!" thinking around lots of exponential processes - the delayed response to the Covid pandemic is one obvious recent example. Unless you’ve had the kind of mathematical training that lets you trust a model of an exponential process, your gut feeling just doesn’t line up with reality & that leads to making bad decisions.
I am overawed at the thought how rich you must be.
Hah. If only...
Although I did tell everyone I knew to buy Acorn stock because they would get 1/2 of ARM back in the 90s. Sadly none of them believed me & I had no capital at the time...
I have (on the other hand) managed to stay out of the way of various inevitable bubble crashes however. So it’s not all bad.
Heh. I bought a bit of Acorn stock in the early 90s, then got share options when I joined the company. When ARM was sold a while back, it kept me going for a few years.
Between us, Mrs J and I have worked directly for probably a dozen companies. They have all offered stock options. Acorn were the only options that has got us any appreciable sums of money. The stories of grunts making life-changing sums of money from options are mostly myths, designed to enchant naive young engineers ...
+1, unless you are in early enough ( before the company takes off) share options rarely generate much money.
Yes - paid for my new conservatory on the same basis from dad's tiny stake in the original float.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
It's an absolute nonsense, people can date who they like - the same horseshit has been used about people (Mainly lesbians it seems) that won't date trans. There's no human right that you have to be dated by anyone, you can discriminate on colour, political preferences, gender, trans, baldness - whatever the hell basis you like.
Indeed. Is discriminating between movie star looks with an athlete's body and somewhat obese and ugly to be regarded as just like prejudice against religion or race?
Everyone would like to date people with movie star looks and an athletic body, at least for short term relationships, however most of us do not have movie star looks so are not of interest to people who do have movie star looks.
Unless you are a multi millionaire or billionaire with average or below average looks you are not going to be attractive to most with movie star looks unless you are also a 9 or 10 looks wise
Blimey. Stockton South back into toss-up territory? Matt Vickers will have have to do more than social media posts whilst pissed and writing to the Palace of Westminster catering teams to get Parmo on the menu.
TBH to Matt I think he is a decent human being. Its just that punters in Stockton are fickle, they turned out in large numbers to vote for him and expect delivery. He hasn't done much yet.
These constituency results are decidedly mixed for Labour IMO. Good swings in about 20 seats, but some of the others are pretty dismal.
That will be GE 2023 in a nutshell. The Con majority will reduce as Labour take back some seats... but it will be patchy and not enough to deprive the Conservatives of another 4-5 year term
Con majority 30-40? Seems about right to me.
It will mark the beginning of the end of this latest prolonged period of Tory government though IMO.
Mind you still some achievement, only one party has won a general election after ten years in power since universal suffrage in 1918. Major's Tories in 1992
I think it might be what happens to the LDs in the South that swings it against the Conservatives. I suspect even on today's figures in the RedWall, Johnson has the skills to turn those seats back the way of the Conservatives.
If he starts to struggle in the RedWall, Johnson's golden goose is a referendum for the restoration of capital punishment.
If Starmer does become PM it will most likely be because of LD and SNP gains from the Conservatives as well as a few Labour gains.
I cannot see Starmer regaining most of the Redwall to get Labour most seats or a majority
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
Is this person arguing in favour of the UK being self-sufficient in food?
The key question is whether UKG is in favour of self sufficiency in food. Their actions suggest otherwise, as they prioritise imports over home production. Which is what this person is saying.
I don't think it's remotely possible for the UK to be self sufficient in food. It's not a question of what anyone is in favour of, it's a question of reality.
OK. To reiterate my point. UKG by its actions is making the UK less sufficient in food by prioritising imports over home production.
Why is that a bad thing?
Was it a bad thing we were less sufficient in coal?
It isn't necessarily a bad thing if you believe immigration is bad per se, and less important than maintaining home industries. But the consequence of restricting the means to profitably produce food at market prices, while you don't restrict imports of competitor products, is to see imports replace home production.
I don't think immigration is bad whatsoever. I support as much high-skilled, high-wage immigration as possible.
I think immigration for minimum wage jobs, deflating our economy and driving up costs combined with giving those who come here for minimum wages jobs housing benefit, universal credit etc because minimum wage isn't enough to live in this nation is bad. Don't you?
I don't think this, no. Because it ignores market reality. Not an expert, but I don't think slaughtermen were working at minimum wage under FoM anyway.
Actually they were. We had job details being shared here saying that night shifts in an abattoir in South East England were being paid £9.12 per hour.
Do you think its feasible or productive to be working for £9.12 per hour for overnight shifts in South East England? Or to be frank anywhere in the UK.
Glassdoor has average slaughtermen salaries at £31 000, which is about twice minimum wage. I'm sure when you drill down there are big variations. But those apparently reasonably paid jobs will go if we import the products instead, thanks to the government immigration and trade policies.
No they won't, if they're productive they'll stay.
What will go is the £9.12 per hour jobs being advertised.
Do you think its acceptable to expect a night shift job for difficult work to be filled for £9.12 per hour?
Glassdoor really isn't accurate when looking at wages for UK jobs...
I agree, but at least a proportion of people will be paid that. £9 an hour isn't the average salary either. The market forces principle still applies, regardless of what the actual average salary is.
The market was broken because of the Single Market making £9 per hour plus in work benefits sound attractive to people from Eastern Europe earning potentially £2
Which, slice it how you like, was the purest form of arbitrage against UK workers.
Exactly. Big business were just buying and selling labour as if it were an index they could arb on the futures market, and now it’s all over they don’t know what to do.
Mr. Fishing, got to say I still think automated driving is like flying cars - something technically possible that won't be practical for almost anything.
You get slow burns though. Look at video calls. "Vidphones" were a staple of c20th Sci fi. Then there were 15 years when they were possible via Skype and facetime but nobody saw the point. Then lockdown and kaboom.
Same thing happened with faxes, actually. The technology was there since ww2, the legal profession had them from the 70s, but it took a postal strike in the 80s before they caught on.
Faxes and video calls don't immediately stop you paying for something else, though, except relatively cheap stamps. Automation saves wages. It'll catch on fine.
25 years ago, Acorn did a lot of work on Video-on-Demand technology. Set Top Boxes were needed, as PC graphics cards and processors were generally not powerful enough to decode the video streams.
Apparently there was a certain amount of negativity in the market, because few people saw the possibility that the Internet could handle the traffic from everyone, and the boxes were restricted to certain cable providers.
I could see the Internet having the bandwidth; what I never guessed was that phones would, within a decade, be able to stream videos at high quality. The rate the technology increased at was massive.
But it involved no fundamental new technology; only improvements on what was existing.
People are very bad at accepting the implications of exponential changes.
In this case, the exponential increase in computing power / £ was going to turn available radio bandwidth & video compression from expensive impossibilities to trivialities in single digit years.
You see similar "unpossible!" thinking around lots of exponential processes - the delayed response to the Covid pandemic is one obvious recent example. Unless you’ve had the kind of mathematical training that lets you trust a model of an exponential process, your gut feeling just doesn’t line up with reality & that leads to making bad decisions.
I am overawed at the thought how rich you must be.
Hah. If only...
Although I did tell everyone I knew to buy Acorn stock because they would get 1/2 of ARM back in the 90s. Sadly none of them believed me & I had no capital at the time...
I have (on the other hand) managed to stay out of the way of various inevitable bubble crashes however. So it’s not all bad.
Heh. I bought a bit of Acorn stock in the early 90s, then got share options when I joined the company. When ARM was sold a while back, it kept me going for a few years.
Between us, Mrs J and I have worked directly for probably a dozen companies. They have all offered stock options. Acorn were the only options that has got us any appreciable sums of money. The stories of grunts making life-changing sums of money from options are mostly myths, designed to enchant naive young engineers ...
+1, unless you are in early enough ( before the company takes off) share options rarely generate much money.
Yes - paid for my new conservatory on the same basis from dad's tiny stake in the original float.
One law change I'd like to see: no special terms on options for management over other staff, e.g. early vesting dates, better price. That's really abusive, and can tempt management into short term **** that shafts the other staff.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
Not that anyone cares anymore but I am sure we all have a list of no-no's. In my case:
a) Trump supporters obviously b) Religious zealots c) Conspiracy cranks d) Fascists e) Communists f) Those with no views g) Those who are just a bit too weird h) Those who are irrational except in the heat of an argument
and the list goes on.
Pretty much with you on all bar (h). Not quite sure what you mean there.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
Not that anyone cares anymore but I am sure we all have a list of no-no's. In my case:
a) Trump supporters obviously b) Religious zealots c) Conspiracy cranks d) Fascists e) Communists f) Those with no views g) Those who are just a bit too weird h) Those who are irrational except in the heat of an argument
and the list goes on.
Pretty much with you on all bar (h). Not quite sure what you mean there.
I can't deal with someone who is irrational in day to day life conversations, but once you get to the point where you are throwing saucepans at each other I am more tolerant.
Ah, I see, yes makes sense now. Way I was reading it was that you particularly dislike people who are mentally wild the whole time except during an argument when they suddenly become cool as cucumbers. And I was struggling to imagine such a person. Michael Gove, I suppose, might fit that bill. Easy to see him going nuts in a club, making a connection, then once ensconced tete-a-tete in a quiet corner treating his companion to a calm and methodical analysis of how the UK was being held back, economically and culturally, by its membership of the European Union.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
"Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth."
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
Interesting header. It has long been my view that the Brexit obsessed Tory right has convinced itself of a lie: that ex-labour voters either voted Tory or abstained because of Brexit. That data clearly shows that that was minority interest: the real driver was Corbyn. Now they have "got Brexit done" and gotten rid of Corbyn, why will that demographic vote Tory? Maybe some of them like having a bit of a clown for their PM?
Three English by elections since Corbyn left as leader, and Labour got their worst vote share ever in all three. The vote repellent has gone, so why was their share so historically bad, three times over?
All this is part of incel talking points leaking into the mainstream. I am a rugged individual. I don't want the government in my life, I want guns and dope, no taxes, no welfare. Free market, survival of the fittest, weakling libtards. Wait! I can't get laid? I'm being discrimated against. The government's duty is to socialise sexual intercourse.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
It is a well written article, but I am feeling rather exhausted with these culture wars and couldn't even get to the end of it. It feels like the 'progressive authoritarians' have won, and they get to decide everything, including what is and isn't acceptable debate. A lot of people voted for Trump not because they abuse women (as alluded to above) but because they see they are faced with a choice between one form of authoritarianism and another; and simply think that Trump is less dangerous. It is worth doing more to try and understand this perspective, but there is no sign that progressives will embark on such a process, thus perpetuating the existing polarisation that is likely to lead eventually to catastrophic outcomes for the US.
Looking over here, PB is a great website for much discussion but on certain issues it rapidly descends in to a progressive/authoritarian echo chamber, as people with contrary views withdraw from the debate - it is a similar process at play.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
It's an absolute nonsense, people can date who they like - the same horseshit has been used about people (Mainly lesbians it seems) that won't date trans. There's no human right that you have to be dated by anyone, you can discriminate on colour, political preferences, gender, trans, baldness - whatever the hell basis you like.
That's true. But it's also nonsense imo to equate screening out Trumpers from your romantic life to screening out, say, Jews. The first is mainly about values, the second is mainly about identity.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
Some of my ancestors were French Huguenots, I am a little bit French genetically
For many years we've had talk of "productivity crisis" in the UK, whereby output per hour worked has been relatively stagnant.
It is becoming clear that part of this was many industries relying on the open tap of cheap immigrant labour that worked under terrible conditions at or below minimum wage.
This will have to lead to improved wages or better working conditions to attract domestic workers, which will result in one of the following in the long-run:
1) Higher costs feed into higher price of foods - i.e. inflation
2) Higher costs reduce corporate profitability
3) Businesses wind up or fail, such that we increase imports. While this sounds bad, almost by definition we are stopping some of the least productive areas of the economy that can't survive on paying decent wages and working conditions.
In the short-run, disruption will reign supreme as businesses adjust.
Absolutely right. But don't forget the biggest benefit of #3 - that failing businesses in low productivity areas leads to labour and capital being redeployed to more productive and efficient sectors.
Yes absolutely.
One of the main missing pieces at the moment seems to the provision of employee training for those that are changing industries. It'd be good to see some kind of framework or tax incentives to encourage more in-work training.
Otherwise we just need to treat this part of our economy as an opioid addict. Provide relief to deal with the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, but don't stop the detox.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
"Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth."
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
Whenever I'm in the vicinity of False Equivalence Alley, Ed, and I decide to pop my head around the corner and take a quick look, just to satisfy my curiosity, guess who I very often see loitering there?
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Cheers for that well thought out piece @TimS. Just some thoughts / comments:
1. Tory opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws mainly came from the landowning classes out of a desire to protect their own interests, not to help the smaller farmers (who had far less political influence then);
2. There is an interesting argument that the UK's dominance in the world stems from the embracing of free trade as it allowed new entrants a foothold and therefore a platform to grow from. I think there is a lot in that argument. In fact, if you want a prime example, look at the US - arguably one of the most protectionist markets out there when it comes to a lot of goods;
3. I wouldn't say the Government's stance against the EU is necessarily populist, I think it is more driven by the (probably correct) view that the EU will, by default, act against the UK's interests post-Brexit and that the only way to get any sort of equitable treatment is to play and sound tough. I'd argue most people want a friendly relationship with the UK but not at the expense of the UK being walked over
For many years we've had talk of "productivity crisis" in the UK, whereby output per hour worked has been relatively stagnant.
It is becoming clear that part of this was many industries relying on the open tap of cheap immigrant labour that worked under terrible conditions at or below minimum wage.
This will have to lead to improved wages or better working conditions to attract domestic workers, which will result in one of the following in the long-run:
1) Higher costs feed into higher price of foods - i.e. inflation
2) Higher costs reduce corporate profitability
3) Businesses wind up or fail, such that we increase imports. While this sounds bad, almost by definition we are stopping some of the least productive areas of the economy that can't survive on paying decent wages and working conditions.
In the short-run, disruption will reign supreme as businesses adjust.
Absolutely right. But don't forget the biggest benefit of #3 - that failing businesses in low productivity areas leads to labour and capital being redeployed to more productive and efficient sectors.
Yes absolutely.
One of the main missing pieces at the moment seems to the provision of employee training for those that are changing industries. It'd be good to see some kind of framework or tax incentives to encourage more in-work training.
Otherwise we just need to treat this part of our economy as an opioid addict. Provide relief to deal with the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, but don't stop the detox.
The wholesale closing of FE colleges, casualisation of the staff and sky high fee increases really hasn't helped with this.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
Not that anyone cares anymore but I am sure we all have a list of no-no's. In my case:
a) Trump supporters obviously b) Religious zealots c) Conspiracy cranks d) Fascists e) Communists f) Those with no views g) Those who are just a bit too weird h) Those who are irrational except in the heat of an argument
and the list goes on.
Pretty much with you on all bar (h). Not quite sure what you mean there.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
Not that anyone cares anymore but I am sure we all have a list of no-no's. In my case:
a) Trump supporters obviously b) Religious zealots c) Conspiracy cranks d) Fascists e) Communists f) Those with no views g) Those who are just a bit too weird h) Those who are irrational except in the heat of an argument
and the list goes on.
Pretty much with you on all bar (h). Not quite sure what you mean there.
I can't deal with someone who is irrational in day to day life conversations, but once you get to the point where you are throwing saucepans at each other I am more tolerant.
Ah, I see, yes makes sense now. Way I was reading it was that you particularly dislike people who are mentally wild the whole time except during an argument when they suddenly become cool as cucumbers. And I was struggling to imagine such a person. Michael Gove, I suppose, might fit that bill. Easy to see him going nuts in a club, making a connection, then once ensconced tete-a-tete in a quiet corner treating his companion to a calm and methodical analysis of how the UK was being held back, economically and culturally, by its membership of the European Union.
I think such a person would fail criteria g) Those who are just a bit too weird.
I have a firm view that once you start throwing saucepans at one another then irrationality is a given. Otherwise it is not allowed.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
No the Conservatives did not repeal them.
Most Tory MPs voted against repealing the Corn Laws, as I said Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of Whig MPs.
Brexit has revived the protectionist Tory party in terms of the party's core vote. Many middle class professional, pro free trade Remainers who voted for Cameron are now voting LD or Starmer Labour. Most protectionist working class UKIP voters from 2015 are now voting Conservative
Some very interesting content in this series of posts, which has got me thinking more about the journey the conservatives have been on.
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
Personally I consider myself a British Gaullist to some extent. Trump combined some elements of Gaullist economics with Poujadist populism. That is now largely the conservative coalition in much of the western world.
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
No true Tory/Brit would ever compare themselves to any French person, least of all De Gaulle.
Some of my ancestors were French Huguenots, I am a little bit French genetically
I know you're happily loved up now, but when you were out on the pull you could have tried the old Phil Lynott line. 'Are there any girls here tonight with a bit of French in them? Are there any girls here that would like a little bit more French in them?'
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
"Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth."
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
Whenever I'm in the vicinity of False Equivalence Alley, Ed, and I decide to pop my head around the corner and take a quick look, just to satisfy my curiosity, guess who I very often see loitering there?
Kinablu, it's prejudice, simple as. Nobody here would accept such language if it was made in reference to other groups. And your "it's the plain and simple truth" is straight out of the "my best mate is black" textbook of excuses for making such comments.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
"Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth."
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
Whenever I'm in the vicinity of False Equivalence Alley, Ed, and I decide to pop my head around the corner and take a quick look, just to satisfy my curiosity, guess who I very often see loitering there?
Kinablu, it's prejudice, simple as. Nobody here would accept such language if it was made in reference to other groups. And your "it's the plain and simple truth" is straight out of the "my best mate is black" textbook of excuses for making such comments.
There is, of course, a world of difference between prejudice and irrational or unfair prejudice.
Interesting header. It has long been my view that the Brexit obsessed Tory right has convinced itself of a lie: that ex-labour voters either voted Tory or abstained because of Brexit. That data clearly shows that that was minority interest: the real driver was Corbyn. Now they have "got Brexit done" and gotten rid of Corbyn, why will that demographic vote Tory? Maybe some of them like having a bit of a clown for their PM?
Three English by elections since Corbyn left as leader, and Labour got their worst vote share ever in all three. The vote repellent has gone, so why was their share so historically bad, three times over?
Brexit was a bigger and deeper reason than Corbyn for the terrible GE19 performance. By similar token, Brexit was a bigger and deeper reason than Corbyn for the good GE17 performance. Corbyn haters push the 2nd of these truths and deny the 1st. Corbyn fans deny the 2nd and push the 1st.
As for this debate, you are correct that Starmer is doing badly, and looks likely to lose the next GE, but imo you overplay the point because you project too much of your own feelings into it. Eg making out that his previous 'Remainerdom' is a big problem (it isn't, it's your other thing 'charisma'), and here, where you're implying Starmer has gone backwards from GE19. Not so. He hasn't. The polls say he hasn't, as do those byelections when you think about the circumstances, the Woollens, Galloway, the LibDem tactical voting.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
How's that contradictory?
If third world wages are to be paid, they should be paid to people living in the third world. Not the UK.
Yes it is better to import products than import minimum wage people, who are then paid housing benefit and universal credit in order to live while driving up costs here.
How do you pay people first world wages if you are importing everything. if you want first world wages you either need to produce and export at first world prices or buy all your own stuff that you produced on first world wages. Your solutions are for dummies unable to grasp that changing £20 notes for £10 notes is not viable for long.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
Is this person arguing in favour of the UK being self-sufficient in food?
The key question is whether UKG is in favour of self sufficiency in food. Their actions suggest otherwise, as they prioritise imports over home production. Which is what this person is saying.
I don't think it's remotely possible for the UK to be self sufficient in food. It's not a question of what anyone is in favour of, it's a question of reality.
OK. To reiterate my point. UKG by its actions is making the UK less sufficient in food by prioritising imports over home production.
Why is that a bad thing?
Was it a bad thing we were less sufficient in coal?
It isn't necessarily a bad thing if you believe immigration is bad per se, and less important than maintaining home industries. But the consequence of restricting the means to profitably produce food at market prices, while you don't restrict imports of competitor products, is to see imports replace home production.
I don't think immigration is bad whatsoever. I support as much high-skilled, high-wage immigration as possible.
I think immigration for minimum wage jobs, deflating our economy and driving up costs combined with giving those who come here for minimum wages jobs housing benefit, universal credit etc because minimum wage isn't enough to live in this nation is bad. Don't you?
I don't think this, no. Because it ignores market reality. Not an expert, but I don't think slaughtermen were working at minimum wage under FoM anyway.
Actually they were. We had job details being shared here saying that night shifts in an abattoir in South East England were being paid £9.12 per hour.
Do you think its feasible or productive to be working for £9.12 per hour for overnight shifts in South East England? Or to be frank anywhere in the UK.
Glassdoor has average slaughtermen salaries at £31 000, which is about twice minimum wage. I'm sure when you drill down there are big variations. But those apparently reasonably paid jobs will go if we import the products instead, thanks to the government immigration and trade policies.
No they won't, if they're productive they'll stay.
What will go is the £9.12 per hour jobs being advertised.
Do you think its acceptable to expect a night shift job for difficult work to be filled for £9.12 per hour?
Are you really as stupid as you make out. You actually think they will keep the ones on £30K + and bag the £9 an hour ones. FFS how can anyone be so thick.
'In a separate interview, Nick Allen, the chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association, told Sky News that while the government criticised producers for paying low wages, it was happy for meat to be imported from countries that paid low wages. He said:
"What’s interesting is [the government is] happy to ban the import of non-UK labour in this country, but they continue to actually aid and abet imported food from countries that have got access to this labour.
At the end of the day someone has to pay for these increased wages and they somewhat get in the way of that by aiding and abetting imported food."'
The revealing bit of that Boris interview was what he said about this being a transition. We are about to destructively test the drive of the last 20 years where consumers actively choose British products. Frankly a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign is the obvious thing missing from the government's strategy - why aren't they doing so?
Instead we are going to see our stuff get a lot more expensive, making imports more appealing than ever. People want to buy local but if they can't because it costs too much then the choice of import vs nothing will push import for many.
Which will literally fuck farming to death. Philip and some free market ideologues may welcome this, most people won't. The government will try and blame farmers until as with all the other "lets blame industry" attempts the actual numbers get published and the minister is shown up to be an absolute spanner. At which point the government caves in.
Exactly, I can't work out if the government are autarkists (like Germany in 1930s) or free range marketeers (like the UK in the C19 and early C20, which wrecked farming also).
Why the heck should the government get involved in a "buy British, eat British, build British" campaign? How is that the government's responsibility? Advertising and marketing is not the government's responsibility, that's not what we pay our taxes for.
Buying British when its economically competitive so why not buy British is easy to do. Buying British when it costs a premium ... that's actually then up to the consumers to make their choice.
If British farming gets fucked to death, then quite frankly I don't see why we should care - any more than when British mining got fucked to death. How are farmers any different to miners?
Farming takes up 70% of this countries land, but agriculture represents 0.59% of GDP. I'm not sure if that includes the 0.1% of GDP that the fisheries represent.
If we import more, we import more, but what we should not be importing is slavesserfspeasants minimum wage employees.
That's what the Tories and free market liberals said until the Great War. Which the UK very nearly lost if the Germans hadn't been so pusillanimous with the U-boats.
Amazing the Brexiters love to go on about Spitfires but forget the Battle of the Atlantic.
Yes and the liberals were right then and even more right now.
We didn't lose the war and we're not at any real risk in the 21st century of being blockaded so get real. We are a wealthy nation, especially if we stop deflating our economy by importing from the third world, or dedicating 70% of land to 0.49% of GDP.
We spent decades relying upon imported coal for our electricity and we didn't get impoverished as a nation or blockaded by U-Boats when that happened. Special pleading by vested interests should be treated with the same amount of respect as the NUM got in the 80s.
Plenty of hostages to fortune there.
Why was it OK to import coal for our electricity but not import meat?
In the modern world electricity is just as important as food.
Miners voted Labour.
Farmers vote Conservative. And put bloody big signs in their fields during election campaigns.
I think PT has forgotten the Tory Party was the party who introduced the Corn Laws in 1815.
Peel was only able to repeal them with the support of the Whigs. Most of his party still backed them and so his fellow free trading Peelites who were a minority in the Tory party ended up forming the Liberal party with the Whigs and Radicals in the 1850s
The Tories implemented them, and the Conservatives repealed them. The old Tory party you back is dead, it died in the 19th century.
I would be a Whig if we had Tory v Whig old-school. But the Conservatives absorbed a lot of the old Whig thinking.
The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies),
That seems a strange comment.
The President of the European Commission herself, Ursula von der Leyen, is of the opinion that we are not amongst the EU's closest allies.
This is the relevant section from her "State of the EU 2021" speech, made on 15/9/2021.
https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/soteu_2021_address_en_0.pdf Honourable Members, In a more contested world, protecting your interests is not only about defending yourself. It is about forging strong and reliable partnerships. This is not a luxury – it is essential for our future stability, security and prosperity. This work starts by deepening our partnership with our closest allies. With the US we will develop our new agenda for global change – from the new Trade and Technology Council to health security and sustainability. The EU and the US will always be stronger – together. The same is true of our neighbours in the Western Balkans. Before the end of the month, I will travel to the region to send a strong signal of our commitment to the accession process. We owe it to all those young people who believe in a European future. This is why we are ramping up our support through our new investment and economic plan, worth around a third of the region’s GDP. Because an investment in the future of the Western Balkans is an investment in the future of the EU. And we will also continue investing in our partnerships across our neighbourhood – from stepping up our engagement in the Eastern Partnership to implementing the new Agenda for the Mediterranean and continuing to work on the different aspects of our relationship with Turkey.
Note that this is not part of the French submarine tantrum, and Brussels cutting its nose off in support, as AUKUS was announced on the 16/9/2021.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth.
You've literally just given a masterclass in what prejudice is.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting culture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
The article seems offended that 94% of Ivy League female students wouldn't date a Trumper. But why? That ought to be a high figure and it's good to see it is. It shows the right sort of young women, those with both brains and high personal standards, are getting into top colleges over there. Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth. They like Donald Trump, ffs. I mean, c'mon, that's a 'tell' if ever there was one, and you have to draw the line somewhere. Some Trumpers will be ok, of course, and it's important to say so, but it makes perfect sense to screen them out if you're time limited (which I'm guessing these Ivy League types will be).
"Trump supporters are likely to be thick and bigoted. Who wants to date somebody like that if they can avoid it? It's not prejudiced to say this, it's the plain and simple truth."
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
Whenever I'm in the vicinity of False Equivalence Alley, Ed, and I decide to pop my head around the corner and take a quick look, just to satisfy my curiosity, guess who I very often see loitering there?
I dunno? You?
You're brilliant at assuming rank prejudice in others who you don't agree with whilst believing you're totally free of it yourself.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Why the hell would anyone sane be willing to go on a date and talk to a Trumpite?
Life is way too short.
There may be something in the idea that making it a key tenet of your Tinder profile is annoyingly performative, but as far as I can tell the youth have always been a bit performative.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Why the hell would anyone sane be willing to go on a date and talk to a Trumpite?
Life is way too short.
There may be something in the idea that making it a key tenet of your Tinder profile is annoyingly performative, but as far as I can tell the youth have always been a bit performative.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Why the hell would anyone sane be willing to go on a date and talk to a Trumpite?
Life is way too short.
There may be something in the idea that making it a key tenet of your Tinder profile is annoyingly performative, but as far as I can tell the youth have always been a bit performative.
Likening it to anti-Semitism? Get a grip.
There's a difference between someone who voted Republican in the Presidential election of 2016 or even 2020 and a "Trump supporter" who marched on the Capitol.
To suggest there's full equivalence is just prejudice.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Right, my initial pre-judgement on someone who said they were a Trump supporter is that they would be: selfish, misogynist, racist, and inclined to accept conspiracy theories. Not attractive to me.
However, I must allow that it's possible someone would be loving, caring and generous, but somehow rationalise supporting Trump, perhaps by elevating one issue above all others (e.g. Isolationism, or opposition to the Clinton dynasty).
If asked the question I would probably say that I wouldn't date a Trump supporter, but I'm making the assumptions in my first paragraph, and there's diversity even among Trump supporters. They won't all be the same, even if enough of them are similar enough that a stereotype works most of the time.
On topic (ish) Keir Starmer is an uninspiring product but that won't matter if the economy stagflates - Labour could simply win by default anyway.
Remember 1974.
I have always agreed with the notion that Governments lose, oppositions don't win.
Your boy can win despite stagflation. And if winning is all that matters. starting ulture wars and scapegoating minorities are meat and drink to Johnson's current audience. Even if the economy is on its knees, my long held view that incumbency takes the hit has been proven wrong by the fuel crisis.
It is not the crisis, but who gets the blame for the crisis. Previous governments, Remainers, woke lefties, foreigners, foreign governments are all fair game, and Johnson is winning at that game.
Is it shocking that only a small minority women would date someone who (presumably, if supporting Trump) think it is ok to "grab them by the pussy"?
How would you feel about a poll finding that few women of Jewish heritage would date a Corbynista? Would that be shocking evidence of the the 'rise of regressive authoritarianism'?
If you want to shape the world, then get out there and do it, whether left, right or centre. US conservatives need to stop being such snowflakes.
You haven't read the article, have you?
I have. I don't have time to go through each of the points raised or the issues with many of the dubious studies quoted (they tend to be surveys with carefully worded questions and samples and no comparison group - how many elite Trumpers would date a Sanders supporter?) so I focused on the claim that the article leads with.
I fully support the First... and Second... paragraphs towards the end of the article. They are statements of common sense. Only an imagined woke bogeyman is fighting against those.
Kaufmann mentions the Forstater case - which she won (belatedly, after appeal, but she won). It established her right to have her views and to express them, the opposite of what Kaufmann is claiming.
I don't know how to explain this. There will be people with leftist/woke views who try and impose those on others and employ them in recruitment or promotion. Those people should be sacked. They are a tiny minority - I don't believe I have ever met one. There were in the past (and likely now) those who tried to impose their racism/sexism on employment/promotion or wouldn't hire the person who was a union rep or whatever (also a tiny minority, but I have met them). They should have been sacked too.
In the UK, at least, there are protections. Those apparently hated ethnic group/ sexual orientation/gender forms from HR on recruitment? Guess what, they're there to pick up on white straight men not getting a fair deal too. As long as the white straight men bother to fill them it, that is. I recruit in a university, we never get to see those forms in recruitment and nor should we.
"Precisely the same manner..." ...Among their male counterparts, 90 percent would date a Clinton supporter but only 33 percent would date a Trump supporter. Spencer Case argues that those who politically discriminate are acting in precisely the same manner as those who justify prejudice against Muslims or Jews...
I wouldn't date someone who was more than faintly religious. Nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to throw the word "prejudice" around, it's their prerogative to be wrong.
But, you might not put it as an as absolute "red line" on your dating profile, right? You'd at least be willing to go out on a date to talk to and listen to her first?
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Right, my initial pre-judgement on someone who said they were a Trump supporter is that they would be: selfish, misogynist, racist, and inclined to accept conspiracy theories. Not attractive to me.
However, I must allow that it's possible someone would be loving, caring and generous, but somehow rationalise supporting Trump, perhaps by elevating one issue above all others (e.g. Isolationism, or opposition to the Clinton dynasty).
If asked the question I would probably say that I wouldn't date a Trump supporter, but I'm making the assumptions in my first paragraph, and there's diversity even among Trump supporters. They won't all be the same, even if enough of them are similar enough that a stereotype works most of the time.
I think a lot of perfectly normal and ordinary Americans voted for Trump, just as Britons did for Brexit.
It's instructive to me that dating preferences are far more open-minded the other way round, despite both camps not having much time for uber-Woke Democrats or ultra-Remainers.
Comments
I have to say the dialogue I thought was absolutely horrendous, the worst of the Craig era for that. So clunky and just didn't flow at all. Flat delivery of the lines also did not help.
Still not the worst Craig film, that still goes to QoS for me.
I watched Casino Royale last night, that film is a 10/10 to this day, it's so much better than anything that came after it. I feel like it promised something that the films after never were quite able to match.
I hope they reboot it and bring it back to Casino Royale's gritty realism.
There's a big opportunity for some farm based or even mobile abbatoirs.
Requires us to diverge from some EU regulations, which should imo be a suitable opportunity for this.
If he starts to struggle in the RedWall, Johnson's golden goose is a referendum for the restoration of capital punishment.
Unless you are a multi millionaire or billionaire with average or below average looks you are not going to be attractive to most with movie star looks unless you are also a 9 or 10 looks wise
I cannot see Starmer regaining most of the Redwall to get Labour most seats or a majority
Yesterday you made some - seemingly tongue in cheek - remarks along the lines of ladies cycling to holy communion, farms shops and so on. There is a rich and long established mercantilist, anti-free trade tradition in the Tory party dating back to the corn laws and beyond. This is the traditional ideology of the landed class on which the party was based. Some of the rhetoric now (possibly accidentally) coming from ministers could arguably look like a return to the old roots. This would make the politics our version of Gaullism - protect the domestic producers, don't be shy of red tape, and encourage a society of artisan production, with state control over heavy industry.
At the same time other forces are at work in the party too. The populism that sees the EU as the enemy (e.g. Truss neglecting even to mention the bloc among the UK's allies), rails against the urban elites and seeks out a bonfire of regulations. That's a different tradition - to keep with the French theme it's what they would call Poujadisme - the politics of Pierre Poujade. Its British archetype is the White Van Man. That + a hint of cronyism and we're also in the world of Berlusconi. This is a very different tradition from the old Tory one above.
Both of these share one thing in common though which is the protection of the small producer - the artisan, the yeoman farmer, the tradesman - and the skilled manual employee. The trouble is, as people have noted, for this to work for the client group it represents you need protection from both imported labour and imported goods, otherwise the latter will undercut domestic production. At the moment we have one and not the other and that feels inherently unstable. Either you go the free trade route and keep labour on tap, or you go properly protectionist.
There is one magic bullet that would resolve the conundrum, which is automation and technological innovation. Then you see wage growth and margin growth while costs remain competitive. I'm just not sure where and how that will come about here, but we do desperately need it and for that we need major catch up capital investment by business.
(Yep, I fell victim to this...)
Automation is effective if it keeps down costs without rising unemployment.
Andrew Neil talking about the new Tory coalition on BBC2 now
Nothing like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. I remember when people used to trot out the line that young Black men were criminals and, when challenged, said "it's the plain and simple truth".
I am a rugged individual. I don't want the government in my life, I want guns and dope, no taxes, no welfare. Free market, survival of the fittest, weakling libtards.
Wait! I can't get laid?
I'm being discrimated against. The government's duty is to socialise sexual intercourse.
Looking over here, PB is a great website for much discussion but on certain issues it rapidly descends in to a progressive/authoritarian echo chamber, as people with contrary views withdraw from the debate - it is a similar process at play.
One of the main missing pieces at the moment seems to the provision of employee training for those that are changing industries. It'd be good to see some kind of framework or tax incentives to encourage more in-work training.
Otherwise we just need to treat this part of our economy as an opioid addict. Provide relief to deal with the worst of the withdrawal symptoms, but don't stop the detox.
1. Tory opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws mainly came from the landowning classes out of a desire to protect their own interests, not to help the smaller farmers (who had far less political influence then);
2. There is an interesting argument that the UK's dominance in the world stems from the embracing of free trade as it allowed new entrants a foothold and therefore a platform to grow from. I think there is a lot in that argument. In fact, if you want a prime example, look at the US - arguably one of the most protectionist markets out there when it comes to a lot of goods;
3. I wouldn't say the Government's stance against the EU is necessarily populist, I think it is more driven by the (probably correct) view that the EU will, by default, act against the UK's interests post-Brexit and that the only way to get any sort of equitable treatment is to play and sound tough. I'd argue most people want a friendly relationship with the UK but not at the expense of the UK being walked over
I have a firm view that once you start throwing saucepans at one another then irrationality is a given. Otherwise it is not allowed.
'Are there any girls here tonight with a bit of French in them? Are there any girls here that would like a little bit more French in them?'
As for this debate, you are correct that Starmer is doing badly, and looks likely to lose the next GE, but imo you overplay the point because you project too much of your own feelings into it. Eg making out that his previous 'Remainerdom' is a big problem (it isn't, it's your other thing 'charisma'), and here, where you're implying Starmer has gone backwards from GE19. Not so. He hasn't. The polls say he hasn't, as do those byelections when you think about the circumstances, the Woollens, Galloway, the LibDem tactical voting.
You're brilliant at assuming rank prejudice in others who you don't agree with whilst believing you're totally free of it yourself.
It's a masterclass in cognitive dissonance.
This is the crucial factor here: we don't rule out people immediately based on our own pre-judgements without getting to know them first.
This isn't saying we can't have views on our preferred mates; it's saying we give them the benefit of the doubt and view them in the round as individual people.
Life is way too short.
There may be something in the idea that making it a key tenet of your Tinder profile is annoyingly performative, but as far as I can tell the youth have always been a bit performative.
Likening it to anti-Semitism?
Get a grip.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/13/black-woman-always-fetishised-racism-in-bedroom
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/29/wltm-colour-blind-dating-app-racial-discrimination-grindr-tinder-algorithm-racism
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/09/tinder-dating-queer-dark-skinned-black-woman
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/28/racism-and-online-dating
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/29/dating-in-age-of-apps-sex-with-a-black-man-on-bucket-list-ben-arogundade
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/11/my-search-for-mr-woke-a-dating-diary
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2018/jun/26/single-black-female-love-island-the-problem-with-race-and-dating
And nearly all of the pieces are by wimminz.
To suggest there's full equivalence is just prejudice.
However, I must allow that it's possible someone would be loving, caring and generous, but somehow rationalise supporting Trump, perhaps by elevating one issue above all others (e.g. Isolationism, or opposition to the Clinton dynasty).
If asked the question I would probably say that I wouldn't date a Trump supporter, but I'm making the assumptions in my first paragraph, and there's diversity even among Trump supporters. They won't all be the same, even if enough of them are similar enough that a stereotype works most of the time.
It's instructive to me that dating preferences are far more open-minded the other way round, despite both camps not having much time for uber-Woke Democrats or ultra-Remainers.