As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing " thing..
In the 2017 GE we retook Stockton South from the Tories. We selected a very non-Corbyn candidate, crafted a very Blairite campaign which largely ignored national stuff, and unexpectedly won. When I sat co-writing the campaign materials we weren't spreading the message that "the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc", we were trying to dismiss that message which was coming directly from Corbyn's gob.
Labour lost comfortably in 2017. You lot pushed this myth that the performance was a triumph, that if only a few thousand people in a few dozen seats voted the other way then there could have been a triumphant Labour+every other party government which could have brought about World Peace. It was and is rampant bollocks. For all that May screwed her campaign up, she increased the Tory vote by 20%. As we then saw in 2019 that trend continued as traditional Labour voters turned out in their droves to vote Tory.
Corbyn - and all of you in his cult - utterly destroyed the party. Voters who were LLLLLLL across the board voting Tory because Corbyn hated them, their country, their basic beliefs. At which point hard left entryists literally started jabbing the finger in faces and arguing.
The party is doing the "80s re-enactment" because the only way to regain the trust of working people is to purge the lunatics. And unlike Kinnock, Starmer has provben that he is shit at that as well. Corbyn - and all those around him - brought the party into disrepute over the EHRC debacle. Which means they can be expelled by the GC. Not have the whip removed from only Corbyn so that so-called Labour supporters can pay for Him to sue their own party.
Purge the lot. Then you all fuck off back to your lunatic Socialist Unity splinter groups and the party had a chance to be relevant again. Won't happen. Because Keith is a bit shit.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Must be difficult to do soliciting at a distance.
(sorry, couldn’t resist )
You obviously never took part in the chat room Cybersex explosion of the early noughties. There were wild times to be had on MSN chatrooms before they were closed down.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Must be difficult to do soliciting at a distance.
(sorry, couldn’t resist )
You obviously never took part in the chat room Cybersex explosion of the early noughties. There were wild times to be had on MSN chatrooms before they were closed down.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
Narrow minded thinking is your problem there (I don't mean that offensively) you have to look at things from a different angle.
For the Labour right they have a 1980s Labour re-enactment thing going on, time of their lives. There might be a few quarrels about who is Blair (the clever play is claiming to be John Smith and not dying IMO) but mostly they have never had so much fun.
Compare the grumpy angry faces when Labour were leading in polls under Corbyn to the spring in their step now, enough to put a smile on even the most hardened leftists face (can confirm here)
The Labour left, well just some of it maybe can only talk for myself, politically I've never had so much fun in my life. Watching the amount of excuses and nuance come out for various polling results from people who previously had no time for even polls which showed small Labour leads is incredibly satisfying. I've never cared about best PM polling before but watching don't know catch up with Starmer as Johnson speeds on past it is almost as good as watching the football.
The SNP, my god the SNP. We still have some SNP posters on here I assume?
Own up, you guys either picked Keir Starmer or somehow advise him?
Whilst staying within the bounds of realism I'm not sure an SNP supporter could hope for much more from the current Labour party.
The Greens seem likely to gain from any rightward shift in Labour the same way they suffered from a leftward one.
The Tories can do whatever they like, what is not to like as a Tory? (don't give me the strong opposition line, I was here when Labour were leading in the polls, they don't want strong opposition)
The Lib Dems are the only party not really getting anything out of Labour but I'm not sure they could in any possible situation, even more pointless than Labour.
So the Labour party are providing a bit of enjoyment for everyone they can be, can you really ask for much more than that?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
The Labour Party’s whole problem is that their roots - highly unionised industrial workers based in medium sized communities - have gone. And they are not coming back. Socialism and social democracy were both very much twentieth century phenomena, and have now failed and been discarded.
What they need to do is find new roots. That’s Starmer’s real challenge.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
I’d there’s one thing a Labour Party should be standing for, it’s the rights of those with insecure, low-paid and increasingly self-employed jobs.
Corbyn made noises on zero hours contracts.
The problem was he didn’t really understand them. So his proposals for a blanket ban would have created at least as many problems as they solved.
Yes, he’d hear a bad story from a warehouse worker or taxi driver, and forget about the millions of students and people between jobs, for whom a causal job in a bar is important to keep them afloat.
Or supply teachers. Or agency nurses.
The annoying thing is there are half a dozen very simple ways to improve the situation. For example, anyone who has worked over twenty hours a week on a ZHC for a single employer for six months should be given the option to move onto a full contract. Or somebody who has a continuous record of 52 weeks work including holiday time for one employer must be given notice periods and redundancy pay equivalent to an average of the FTE of someone on a mandated hours contract across those 52 weeks.
Neither would be difficult and both would improve matters at say Amazon immeasurably.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Must be difficult to do soliciting at a distance.
(sorry, couldn’t resist )
You obviously never took part in the chat room Cybersex explosion of the early noughties. There were wild times to be had on MSN chatrooms before they were closed down.
You’re quite right, I didn’t.
I spent my time at uni on JSTOR, not MSN.
I remember being shown a chatroom at my college’s computer room in about 1995. No idea what that ran on. However it was a little too public for such activities.
Up here in Buchan its still freezing cold. Lots of snow on the ground though the roads and pavements are clear. Went for a walk last night, very little to hear apart from the stream, a fantastic display of stars overhead. So very different to suburban Teesside.
Entertainingly half the village seems to know we are here and that we were coming. OK so the house is one of the feature ones and the previous owners had been here 30 years, and we already had my brother's family up here.
Its still quite nice though - chatting with the lady in the shop and she said "my little boy likes to run in your side garden, I've been trying to tell him he can't do now its been sold". Naah, let him run around, its no problem.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
Narrow minded thinking is your problem there (I don't mean that offensively) you have to look at things from a different angle.
For the Labour right they have a 1980s Labour re-enactment thing going on, time of their lives. There might be a few quarrels about who is Blair (the clever play is claiming to be John Smith and not dying IMO) but mostly they have never had so much fun.
Compare the grumpy angry faces when Labour were leading in polls under Corbyn to the spring in their step now, enough to put a smile on even the most hardened leftists face (can confirm here)
The Labour left, well just some of it maybe can only talk for myself, politically I've never had so much fun in my life. Watching the amount of excuses and nuance come out for various polling results from people who previously had no time for even polls which showed small Labour leads is incredibly satisfying. I've never cared about best PM polling before but watching don't know catch up with Starmer as Johnson speeds on past it is almost as good as watching the football.
The SNP, my god the SNP. We still have some SNP posters on here I assume?
Own up, you guys either picked Keir Starmer or somehow advise him?
Whilst staying within the bounds of realism I'm not sure an SNP supporter could hope for much more from the current Labour party.
The Greens seem likely to gain from any rightward shift in Labour the same way they suffered from a leftward one.
The Tories can do whatever they like, what is not to like as a Tory? (don't give me the strong opposition line, I was here when Labour were leading in the polls, they don't want strong opposition)
The Lib Dems are the only party not really getting anything out of Labour but I'm not sure they could in any possible situation, even more pointless than Labour.
So the Labour party are providing a bit of enjoyment for everyone they can be, can you really ask for much more than that?
Fantastic to see The Jezziah back on the site. And great to see that you haven't copied Bastani and fucked off back to the Tories!
I'm not SNP. I don't want to see an endless SNP government. But my two votes - and those of my wife and my brother and my sister in law, all of us migrants to Scotland since their last election - will be for the SNP. As Sean Connery once said, "its time for a change in Scotland"...
Sigh.
As new arrivals can I ask that you give some consideration to the collapse in quality in Scottish education which has deteriorated consistently in the last 10 years; the dangerous position of our Universities who have lived off English students paying fees whilst restricting the access for Scottish students, the appalling state of Police Scotland; the disgraceful waste of public money at Bifab in Fife, at Ferguson Shipyards, at Prestwick Airport, on compensating those wrong prosecuted, I could go on all day.
Please think about the level of dishonesty and cronyism disclosed around Nicola by the Salmond fiasco, the corruption of our Civil Service and the apparent inability of our democratic systems to work in a one party state.
Educate yourself about the legislative intentions of a new SNP government such as the ridiculous Hate Speech bill, the treatment of witches in the middle ages and the never ending obsession with trans rights.
Scotland has a government that is obsessed with making points about independence, who spend their time and energy fabricating grievances and who do so little to address the underlying weakness of the Scottish economy. Viable independence, ironically, drifts ever further out of sight as we increase our dependency upon UK subsidy to an unhealthy degree. Scotland needs a change alright but the SNP is not it.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
Mansfield is a perfect example of the point I was making. Yes, in 2017 Labour added 5%. But the Tory added 18%. That Tory surge was there in an awful lot of seats in 2017, and continued in 2019. In Mansfield Ben Bradley - who even ardent old school Tories must accept is a classic crap MP - added a further 17%. Labour? Dropped by 14% as the anti-Brexit votes loaned to them in 2017 went elsewhere.
In any given election it isn't just about how you perform. Its about how the other candidates perform. A basic rule of adding that hard left activists desperately tried to pretend wasn't true whilst making hilarious claims about how 2017 was Labour's best result since 1945.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
Appreciate that, anyone could see where things were going, election wise by the end. The pollsters can often be run by people to Corbyn's right and it is entertaining to see sometimes which figures they push harder and which figures a twitter account like LeftieStats digs out but I didn't think they were a Tory ploy. Labour vote share wise actually did a little bit better than I expected. But TBH I mostly left here because it isn't fun to be attacked from all angles, it is also much harder to defend than attack.
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
I've heard Bastani talk about this (although from distant memory now and about something I don't really care massively about so bit unsure) the whole idea about him being a Tory is him pictured at some Tory event? is that right?
I think his claim is he was helping a friend or there in some capacity other than as a Tory. Now unless there is some other evidence that really isn't a lot to go on. We also know he took part in 'anti-capitalism' protests and voted Green prior to Corbyn as Labour leader. He is also a young man whose dad was a Muslim and grew up at a time when the left opposed the war in Iraq and a lot of young people and I would expect in even greater numbers by young Muslim people (although no actual evidence of his view at the time)
Neither of us can say for definite but on the balance of evidence I would say he probably wasn't.
The hard left with their blissful purity of opposition is the closest Labour have come to government in quite some time, surely it is your wing of the party who prefers the blissful purity of opposition? Your guys wouldn't stop whining when Labour led in the polls under the left. They are happy now to be losing under the right.
As for the Labour right they are missing someone with Blair's talent but they are also missing the fact it isn't the electorate has moved on, it isn't currently 1980 and the next leader isn't going to be taking over in the 90's what worked a few decades ago isn't going to work now.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Morning. I see BoZo's biggest fan is up with the lark.
Personally, I cannot stand the slovenly buffoon with a penchant for fancy dress photo opportunities. Its like watching the Generation Game at times, and sometimes worse.
Up here in Buchan its still freezing cold. Lots of snow on the ground though the roads and pavements are clear. Went for a walk last night, very little to hear apart from the stream, a fantastic display of stars overhead. So very different to suburban Teesside.
Entertainingly half the village seems to know we are here and that we were coming. OK so the house is one of the feature ones and the previous owners had been here 30 years, and we already had my brother's family up here.
Its still quite nice though - chatting with the lady in the shop and she said "my little boy likes to run in your side garden, I've been trying to tell him he can't do now its been sold". Naah, let him run around, its no problem.
Good for you, that sounds most promising.
I remember moving down from London, driving onto the ferry pursued by the removal van, and arriving here in the murk one very foggy November morning. On the doormat was a card from the postman for a package; at the callers' office the person behind the counter said "you must be the new person from London" and proceeded to tell me pretty much everything that the previous owner would have known about me. Walking back up the hill a random passer-by proceeded to do the same.
In London my neighbour didn't even know I was moving away, and I'd only spoken to him twice in five years.
I imagine a fair few of the lockdown refugees from the cities are having similar experiences.
Up here in Buchan its still freezing cold. Lots of snow on the ground though the roads and pavements are clear. Went for a walk last night, very little to hear apart from the stream, a fantastic display of stars overhead. So very different to suburban Teesside.
Entertainingly half the village seems to know we are here and that we were coming. OK so the house is one of the feature ones and the previous owners had been here 30 years, and we already had my brother's family up here.
Its still quite nice though - chatting with the lady in the shop and she said "my little boy likes to run in your side garden, I've been trying to tell him he can't do now its been sold". Naah, let him run around, its no problem.
Scotland, unlike most of England AIUI, is still reasonably well set up to cope with snow because we get it often enough to make it worth it. You will also find that the average driver is rather better at handling it, again because it is not alien to them.
This is a real cold patch though. I don't recall the like over the last 10 years. More snow expected tomorrow.
I went for a walk yesterday afternoon. It was absolutely glorious. The sun was glinting on the white hills and the snow was firm and dry under foot. Enjoy it.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
As new arrivals can I ask that you give some consideration to the collapse in quality in Scottish education which has deteriorated consistently in the last 10 years; the dangerous position of our Universities who have lived off English students paying fees whilst restricting the access for Scottish students, the appalling state of Police Scotland; the disgraceful waste of public money at Bifab in Fife, at Ferguson Shipyards, at Prestwick Airport, on compensating those wrong prosecuted, I could go on all day.
Please think about the level of dishonesty and cronyism disclosed around Nicola by the Salmond fiasco, the corruption of our Civil Service and the apparent inability of our democratic systems to work in a one party state.
Educate yourself about the legislative intentions of a new SNP government such as the ridiculous Hate Speech bill, the treatment of witches in the middle ages and the never ending obsession with trans rights.
Scotland has a government that is obsessed with making points about independence, who spend their time and energy fabricating grievances and who do so little to address the underlying weakness of the Scottish economy. Viable independence, ironically, drifts ever further out of sight as we increase our dependency upon UK subsidy to an unhealthy degree. Scotland needs a change alright but the SNP is not it.
On the last point I entirely agree - willing to lend a vote to the SNP now, but won't want an endless SNP hegemony. With respect to "dishonesty and cronyism" is the alternative to vote for a Tory party who is even more dishonest and corrupt? They're all as bad as each other on that front.
On the other policy issues I hear you. But how is any of that different to elsewhere? I have been a Scottish resident for just a few days. But the issues you describe are the same as I left behind in Teesside.
Local schools a badly funded basket-case, with a genuine battle to save our local high school where the taxpayer built a fantastic new building then had it forcibly privatised to an academy chain who brought it to ruin. English universities live off Chinese students paying fees - our (previously) local Durham University campus had latterly become a foundation year institution entirely for Chinese students paying £lots for Durham University and being dumped in Thornaby. Cleveland Police so under-funded that we had 3 full time officers per shift covering a vast area with the obvious surge in crime and ASB. To say nothing of the succession of disastrous Chief Constable appointments. Wastes of Public Money? Ben Houchen International Airport, nationalised by the Tory mayor so that the taxpayer is now liable for its massive loss-making.
The issues you describe are neither unique to Scotland nor to the SNP.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Yes, it was noteworthy that in 2017 Corbyn's vote held up well in traditional Labour areas, indeed gained a few seats in the NW. Clearly not the anathema he became in 2019, where not just Brexit, but also the leader went down badly on the doorstep.
Labour Lefties need to understand that Corbyn is yesterday's man, and Labour centrists need to recapture that enthusiasm that change is possible. "Fun with Flags" is anathema to those suspicious of nationalism, and just looks phoney to nationalists. Labour will not win by aping the Tories. If that is the manifesto then voters will go for the real thing.
You can always find people on twitter but I am not sure there are actually that many lefties who actually want Corbyn to lead Labour, I mean I want the man to have some peace and quiet personally, nice to see the newspapers not camped outside his house every day... wonder what deal they have with Starmer where he mostly gets peace and quiet....
You don't have to have Corbyn, just left wing policies, Corbyn drove a good part of that vote with aspects of himself but a large part of it was because of a left wing offering.
Bloody hell from reading the site this morning .We are going to have a permanent one party state in England and Scotland. Plus a so called Labour voter who now worships Johnson and comes on here every morning and repeats his worship.
Morning. I see BoZo's biggest fan is up with the lark.
Personally, I cannot stand the slovenly buffoon with a penchant for fancy dress photo opportunities. Its like watching the Generation Game at times, and sometimes worse.
The great thing about the 1990s was that almost everyone thought new technology would make life better for ordinary people. Regrettably that doesnt seem to have happened (so far).
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
The problem with this paragraph is its disconnection from reality.
Jeremy Corbyn allied himself his whole life with the causes of Terrorism and Anti-Semitism. That isn't spin, or "contextless" quotes, thats just fact. How do we know its fact? From the things that Jeremy said, where he said them, with whom he said them.
If Jeremy was so passionately against anti-semitism why did he spend decades sharing platform with screaming anti-semites? Why did he sit as an active participant in a pro-Palestinian movement that openly committed anti-semitic attacks against Jews globally and in his own party? If Jeremy was so passionately against violence why did he ally himself with so many terrorist groups? From the IRA to Hesbollah, you don't find yourself accidentally at a wreath laying ceremony for terrorists who tried to slaughter Israelis (anti-semitism again) and "I didn't participate" is laughable.
The idea that the man helped bring peace to the middle east or Northern Ireland is literally incredible. You bring peace by speaking to BOTH sides, not exclusively the one side only. Being bezzies with the IRA is not negotiating peace. People could see right through the excuses you lot were making, "its all right wing lies" is crap when we can watch the video of him sharing hate platforms with terrorists decade after decade.
And then we have his patriotism. Taking the side of Russia after they tried to top their defectors in Salisbury. The automatic assumption that his friends in Russia can't be blamed despite the clear evidence. His absurd reactions to the flag and national anthem. These aren't made up smear stories. They are things we witnessed agog.
This is why Labour are now lost. Your values and not shared by your former voters.
Bloody hell from reading the site this morning .We are going to have a permanent one party state in England and Scotland. Plus a so called Labour voter who now worships Johnson and comes on here every morning and repeats his worship.
Lol - there are a LOT of "so called Labour voters" - who were LLLLLLL all the way across the sheet - who now support the Tories.
As new arrivals can I ask that you give some consideration to the collapse in quality in Scottish education which has deteriorated consistently in the last 10 years; the dangerous position of our Universities who have lived off English students paying fees whilst restricting the access for Scottish students, the appalling state of Police Scotland; the disgraceful waste of public money at Bifab in Fife, at Ferguson Shipyards, at Prestwick Airport, on compensating those wrong prosecuted, I could go on all day.
Please think about the level of dishonesty and cronyism disclosed around Nicola by the Salmond fiasco, the corruption of our Civil Service and the apparent inability of our democratic systems to work in a one party state.
Educate yourself about the legislative intentions of a new SNP government such as the ridiculous Hate Speech bill, the treatment of witches in the middle ages and the never ending obsession with trans rights.
Scotland has a government that is obsessed with making points about independence, who spend their time and energy fabricating grievances and who do so little to address the underlying weakness of the Scottish economy. Viable independence, ironically, drifts ever further out of sight as we increase our dependency upon UK subsidy to an unhealthy degree. Scotland needs a change alright but the SNP is not it.
On the last point I entirely agree - willing to lend a vote to the SNP now, but won't want an endless SNP hegemony. With respect to "dishonesty and cronyism" is the alternative to vote for a Tory party who is even more dishonest and corrupt? They're all as bad as each other on that front.
On the other policy issues I hear you. But how is any of that different to elsewhere? I have been a Scottish resident for just a few days. But the issues you describe are the same as I left behind in Teesside.
Local schools a badly funded basket-case, with a genuine battle to save our local high school where the taxpayer built a fantastic new building then had it forcibly privatised to an academy chain who brought it to ruin. English universities live off Chinese students paying fees - our (previously) local Durham University campus had latterly become a foundation year institution entirely for Chinese students paying £lots for Durham University and being dumped in Thornaby. Cleveland Police so under-funded that we had 3 full time officers per shift covering a vast area with the obvious surge in crime and ASB. To say nothing of the succession of disastrous Chief Constable appointments. Wastes of Public Money? Ben Houchen International Airport, nationalised by the Tory mayor so that the taxpayer is now liable for its massive loss-making.
The issues you describe are neither unique to Scotland nor to the SNP.
The weakness and incompetence of the opposition parties (and their ever increasing lack of experience given the SNP hegemony) are all perfectly valid concerns. I know many who share them.
On schools the main problem is that the number one priority of the SNP is not to rock the boat with the teaching unions, specifically the EIS. What they want they get. The result is that we have persisted in the curriculum for excellence agenda despite overwhelming evidence that it has damaged the quality of education (see PISA results).
We have sought to remove any objective or external marking from our college system and then incentivised them the pass everyone, even if they don't turn up, devaluing the courses to the point they actually decrease employability rather than increase it. This has spread to the schools over the last 2 years as a result of the pandemic and creates a dangerous precedent. We are restricting the choices available in schools so that economics, for example, is no longer available in almost any state school in Scotland. The gap in performance between private schools and state schools, which really didn't exist when I was at school 40 odd years ago, is now massive and growing.
There are no magic wands in respect of the funding of schools but funding is actually one of the lesser problems faced by a system that is no longer producing the work force we are going to need in the future.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
This might sound simplistic but if Corbyn was only slightly less other worldly (for example, if he had been into the Horses and let slip he chatted with the Queen about them) he would have had enough seats to form a government in 2017.
The great thing about the 1990s was that almost everyone thought new technology would make life better for ordinary people. Regrettably that doesnt seem to have happened (so far).
Disagree entirely. Life is so much better for ordinary people now, because of massive advances in technology.
Imagine how a pandemic goes down in the ‘90s, with no broadband, no laptops or mobile phones, and no mRNA vaccines?
Worldwide, the rate at which people are escaping poverty has never been higher.
I'd push back on the idea that we are doing well on vaccine rollout because of the centralised nature of the NHS, Ameriva is also doing well and that is anything but a centralised system.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
Mansfield is a perfect example of the point I was making. Yes, in 2017 Labour added 5%. But the Tory added 18%. That Tory surge was there in an awful lot of seats in 2017, and continued in 2019. In Mansfield Ben Bradley - who even ardent old school Tories must accept is a classic crap MP - added a further 17%. Labour? Dropped by 14% as the anti-Brexit votes loaned to them in 2017 went elsewhere.
In any given election it isn't just about how you perform. Its about how the other candidates perform. A basic rule of adding that hard left activists desperately tried to pretend wasn't true whilst making hilarious claims about how 2017 was Labour's best result since 1945.
2017 has proved to be the classic 'false positive' for the Labour left - hence the shock when the 2019 exit poll sank in. Just checked Mansfield on the new look Electoral Calculus - 16k + majority. Quite extraordinary.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
In the 2017 GE we retook Stockton South from the Tories. We selected a very non-Corbyn candidate, crafted a very Blairite campaign which largely ignored national stuff, and unexpectedly won. When I sat co-writing the campaign materials we weren't spreading the message that "the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc", we were trying to dismiss that message which was coming directly from Corbyn's gob.
Labour lost comfortably in 2017. You lot pushed this myth that the performance was a triumph, that if only a few thousand people in a few dozen seats voted the other way then there could have been a triumphant Labour+every other party government which could have brought about World Peace. It was and is rampant bollocks. For all that May screwed her campaign up, she increased the Tory vote by 20%. As we then saw in 2019 that trend continued as traditional Labour voters turned out in their droves to vote Tory.
Corbyn - and all of you in his cult - utterly destroyed the party. Voters who were LLLLLLL across the board voting Tory because Corbyn hated them, their country, their basic beliefs. At which point hard left entryists literally started jabbing the finger in faces and arguing.
The party is doing the "80s re-enactment" because the only way to regain the trust of working people is to purge the lunatics. And unlike Kinnock, Starmer has provben that he is shit at that as well. Corbyn - and all those around him - brought the party into disrepute over the EHRC debacle. Which means they can be expelled by the GC. Not have the whip removed from only Corbyn so that so-called Labour supporters can pay for Him to sue their own party.
Purge the lot. Then you all fuck off back to your lunatic Socialist Unity splinter groups and the party had a chance to be relevant again. Won't happen. Because Keith is a bit shit.
Sheesh you Blairites are bad winners, you have a party that removes leaders voted in by members on the say of rich donors, you have a party driving away black and minority members and driving away younger people, you have a leader sucking up to the right wing press, you have Corbyn with the whip suspended, you have the suspension of democracy with CLPs being overruled and made to chance from people critical of dear leader...
You have everything you have wanted and still you whine and complain.
To be fair to Starmer even with the best will in the world what more do you want from him? he cannot actually start a campaign of sterilisation against people who want nationalised railways until he gets into office.
The party isn't doing a 80's re-enactment because it wants to win, do you want me to get you the at the time private quotes from the Labour right in response to Labour doing better than expected.....
It isn't disappointment we didn't do better.
Also just to correct you there, working people actually voted for Labour in 2017 in greater numbers, it was the people in retirement age who did it for 'us'.
I think when you say working people you mean people over the age of 50?
Never quite understood the strange idea that millions of not old people votes are bad to get and you only want the older ones. Is it because the younger voters don't share your Blairite views?
TBH it was you Blairites who are more interested in rich donors than normal people that destroyed the Labour party. This may shock you but the Labour party wasn't actually set up to serve the rich...
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
Narrow minded thinking is your problem there (I don't mean that offensively) you have to look at things from a different angle.
For the Labour right they have a 1980s Labour re-enactment thing going on, time of their lives. There might be a few quarrels about who is Blair (the clever play is claiming to be John Smith and not dying IMO) but mostly they have never had so much fun.
Compare the grumpy angry faces when Labour were leading in polls under Corbyn to the spring in their step now, enough to put a smile on even the most hardened leftists face (can confirm here)
The Labour left, well just some of it maybe can only talk for myself, politically I've never had so much fun in my life. Watching the amount of excuses and nuance come out for various polling results from people who previously had no time for even polls which showed small Labour leads is incredibly satisfying. I've never cared about best PM polling before but watching don't know catch up with Starmer as Johnson speeds on past it is almost as good as watching the football.
The SNP, my god the SNP. We still have some SNP posters on here I assume?
Own up, you guys either picked Keir Starmer or somehow advise him?
Whilst staying within the bounds of realism I'm not sure an SNP supporter could hope for much more from the current Labour party.
The Greens seem likely to gain from any rightward shift in Labour the same way they suffered from a leftward one.
The Tories can do whatever they like, what is not to like as a Tory? (don't give me the strong opposition line, I was here when Labour were leading in the polls, they don't want strong opposition)
The Lib Dems are the only party not really getting anything out of Labour but I'm not sure they could in any possible situation, even more pointless than Labour.
So the Labour party are providing a bit of enjoyment for everyone they can be, can you really ask for much more than that?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
The Labour Party’s whole problem is that their roots - highly unionised industrial workers based in medium sized communities - have gone. And they are not coming back. Socialism and social democracy were both very much twentieth century phenomena, and have now failed and been discarded.
What they need to do is find new roots. That’s Starmer’s real challenge.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
I’d there’s one thing a Labour Party should be standing for, it’s the rights of those with insecure, low-paid and increasingly self-employed jobs.
They should. But I don't think this will fit with a) the comfort that many such workers take from self-employment and b) the union funding model. Unions dislike self employment because it reduces the power of unions.
I joined this site hoping it would be different from Guido Fawkes.
I see that Roger and IanB2 are doing their level best to disabuse me of that.
Are you suggesting there is a Staines on this site’s reputation?
Roger and IanB2 are great Guys.
Great posters are those with whom I disagree politically but who can have a serious-minded discussion without being personally abusive. Roger has contributed nothing to the discourse this morning. Zero. Ian has retracted most of his comment, which I accept.
Ydoethur is a good example, as evidenced below, of someone with whom you can disagree (hugely, perhaps) and still respect.
My Plot was to sneak in a few more Guido Fawkes puns...
I’m keeping my powder dry at the moment.
I remember hearing (on a YouTube video I think) that some of the plotters came to grief because their powder had got wet, so they laid it out before a open fire to dry...
The great thing about the 1990s was that almost everyone thought new technology would make life better for ordinary people. Regrettably that doesnt seem to have happened (so far).
I'm pretty ordinary - it's made my life tons easier. Nowadays with an ordinary mobile phone and a few simple apps you can send and receive masses of data that previously involved endless journeys/phone calls, manage virtually all your banking, tax returns, bill paying, masses of basic and not so basic shopping... You can also keep abreast of the news and all the latest political and other gossip. While for sheer fun you can come on PB
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
In the 2017 GE we retook Stockton South from the Tories. We selected a very non-Corbyn candidate, crafted a very Blairite campaign which largely ignored national stuff, and unexpectedly won. When I sat co-writing the campaign materials we weren't spreading the message that "the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc", we were trying to dismiss that message which was coming directly from Corbyn's gob.
Labour lost comfortably in 2017. You lot pushed this myth that the performance was a triumph, that if only a few thousand people in a few dozen seats voted the other way then there could have been a triumphant Labour+every other party government which could have brought about World Peace. It was and is rampant bollocks. For all that May screwed her campaign up, she increased the Tory vote by 20%. As we then saw in 2019 that trend continued as traditional Labour voters turned out in their droves to vote Tory.
Corbyn - and all of you in his cult - utterly destroyed the party. Voters who were LLLLLLL across the board voting Tory because Corbyn hated them, their country, their basic beliefs. At which point hard left entryists literally started jabbing the finger in faces and arguing.
The party is doing the "80s re-enactment" because the only way to regain the trust of working people is to purge the lunatics. And unlike Kinnock, Starmer has provben that he is shit at that as well. Corbyn - and all those around him - brought the party into disrepute over the EHRC debacle. Which means they can be expelled by the GC. Not have the whip removed from only Corbyn so that so-called Labour supporters can pay for Him to sue their own party.
Purge the lot. Then you all fuck off back to your lunatic Socialist Unity splinter groups and the party had a chance to be relevant again. Won't happen. Because Keith is a bit shit.
Sheesh you Blairites are bad winners, you have a party that removes leaders voted in by members on the say of rich donors, you have a party driving away black and minority members and driving away younger people, you have a leader sucking up to the right wing press, you have Corbyn with the whip suspended, you have the suspension of democracy with CLPs being overruled and made to chance from people critical of dear leader...
You have everything you have wanted and still you whine and complain.
To be fair to Starmer even with the best will in the world what more do you want from him? he cannot actually start a campaign of sterilisation against people who want nationalised railways until he gets into office.
The party isn't doing a 80's re-enactment because it wants to win, do you want me to get you the at the time private quotes from the Labour right in response to Labour doing better than expected.....
It isn't disappointment we didn't do better.
Also just to correct you there, working people actually voted for Labour in 2017 in greater numbers, it was the people in retirement age who did it for 'us'.
I think when you say working people you mean people over the age of 50?
Never quite understood the strange idea that millions of not old people votes are bad to get and you only want the older ones. Is it because the younger voters don't share your Blairite views?
TBH it was you Blairites who are more interested in rich donors than normal people that destroyed the Labour party. This may shock you but the Labour party wasn't actually set up to serve the rich...
Remind us what influence the SWP flavoured Labour party has when it continually fails to get into government?
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
The problem with this paragraph is its disconnection from reality.
Jeremy Corbyn allied himself his whole life with the causes of Terrorism and Anti-Semitism. That isn't spin, or "contextless" quotes, thats just fact. How do we know its fact? From the things that Jeremy said, where he said them, with whom he said them.
If Jeremy was so passionately against anti-semitism why did he spend decades sharing platform with screaming anti-semites? Why did he sit as an active participant in a pro-Palestinian movement that openly committed anti-semitic attacks against Jews globally and in his own party? If Jeremy was so passionately against violence why did he ally himself with so many terrorist groups? From the IRA to Hesbollah, you don't find yourself accidentally at a wreath laying ceremony for terrorists who tried to slaughter Israelis (anti-semitism again) and "I didn't participate" is laughable.
The idea that the man helped bring peace to the middle east or Northern Ireland is literally incredible. You bring peace by speaking to BOTH sides, not exclusively the one side only. Being bezzies with the IRA is not negotiating peace. People could see right through the excuses you lot were making, "its all right wing lies" is crap when we can watch the video of him sharing hate platforms with terrorists decade after decade.
And then we have his patriotism. Taking the side of Russia after they tried to top their defectors in Salisbury. The automatic assumption that his friends in Russia can't be blamed despite the clear evidence. His absurd reactions to the flag and national anthem. These aren't made up smear stories. They are things we witnessed agog.
This is why Labour are now lost. Your values and not shared by your former voters.
While true, I don't really buy that this is the reason, or at least the principal reason. It's the discussion we had after Casino's recent lead. There are deeper, wider reasons why the left is struggling, in almost all democracies, over the last decade.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
So what you are saying is Labour should completely disregard why they put on votes somewhere they have been losing them for 20 years in a seat they want to win back?!
I think you have a point but I am not sure it is a very good one. I don't think anybody of note is suggesting you put Corbyn as leader but ignoring why you gained votes somewhere you want to gain votes is either incompetence or because it might get in the way of doing a Labour 1980s re-enactment.
Bloody hell from reading the site this morning .We are going to have a permanent one party state in England and Scotland. Plus a so called Labour voter who now worships Johnson and comes on here every morning and repeats his worship.
Lol - there are a LOT of "so called Labour voters" - who were LLLLLLL all the way across the sheet - who now support the Tories.
And lots of Labour activists (or perhaps just keyboard warriors) who would prefer to turn away from the flag even if it means turning away from power, it would seem....
I'd push back on the idea that we are doing well on vaccine rollout because of the centralised nature of the NHS, Ameriva is also doing well and that is anything but a centralised system.
What is working well is that there is a centralised NHS system working in tandem with local GPs, primary care networks and hospitals. There is a certain amount of chaos with different areas moving at different speeds - locally Farnham was doing over-65s last week, Farnborough has just called them up, Fleet starts Monday - but that appears benign and is being tolerated. There seems to be little banging on about there being a vaccine postcode lottery.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I'd push back on the idea that we are doing well on vaccine rollout because of the centralised nature of the NHS, Ameriva is also doing well and that is anything but a centralised system.
What is working well is that there is a centralised NHS system working in tandem with local GPs, primary care networks and hospitals. There is a certain amount of chaos with different areas moving at different speeds - locally Farnham was doing over-65s last week, Farnborough has just called them up, Fleet starts Monday - but that appears benign and is being tolerated. There seems to be little banging on about there being a vaccine postcode lottery.
Another Vaccine anecdote - mate's parents, 61, 30 mins from London, jabbed last week.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
This might sound simplistic but if Corbyn was only slightly less other worldly (for example, if he had been into the Horses and let slip he chatted with the Queen about them) he would have had enough seats to form a government in 2017.
There are some little bits and pieces that could have helped here and there I'm sure being realistic even if he had just about made a coalition government the Labour right would have probably collapsed the thing in favour of getting a Tory government before any of the other parties could ask for something.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I say this as a worker in IT.
From my experience, I am constantly amazed that any IT worker doesn't function as a self employed consultant. Especially on retail projects, the day rates are $$$$$$$$$$$
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
All this talk of a permanent move to WHF for millions is utter tosh imho.
It is classic nonsense futurology.
Sure, there may be more flexibility especially for more established staff. Two or three days a week at home perhaps for some. But millions all WFH all the time. Nope.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
I don’t know what will happen but Zoom Fatigue is real. There will be less time spent in offices to be sure but reports of their death are exaggerated. Back in the late 90s, when I was a trainee solicitor, the head of the department I qualified into worked from home 2 or more days a week so it was possible even then - but he wasn’t popular. Even after I qualified in 2000 I could dial into my work email and work from home that way but felt out of the loop. I’m going in for the first time next week or the week after as I have a physical trial bundle to prepare.
As noted it's all about the parties setting expectations and I find it really hard to see what a reasonable expectation would be. Labour winning a few more mayoraltys seems a must, but other than that what makes a good, ok or bad night I'm not sure of.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
All this talk of a permanent move to WHF for millions is utter tosh imho.
It is classic nonsense futurology.
Sure, there may be more flexibility especially for more established staff. Two or three days a week at home perhaps for some. But millions all WFH all the time. Nope.
My experience was that half decent staff who asked for such an arrangement always got it anyway....
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I say this as a worker in IT.
From my experience, I am constantly amazed that any IT worker doesn't function as a self employed consultant. Especially on retail projects, the day rates are $$$$$$$$$$$
About a decade ago I got a glorious wake up working for a firm. We were a contracting firm. I was part of a 2 man team working for an investment bank. The other team member was moved off the project by my firm. My firm had a contractual obligation to supply two devs. The skill set needed was niche. My firm hired a contractor on day rate to fill the gap. I knew exactly how much the minimum day rate for the skillset needed was at let me tell you it was more than triple my salary.
EDIT: As for why everyone doesn't do it - you often end up in shit projects that are no fun. Also the GFC was a real tough time for contractors - having you rate cut 40% overnight and the market flooded with senior devs desperate for a job gives people pause to this day.
I hear that ferry freight levels have returned to normal. Was this the last Remain dog that turns out not to have barked?
Premature with half the lorries still returning empty
Given the number of Brits who are going to be eating out on Britain's coasts this summer, I reckon we're gonna need the Welsh lamb and Shellfish here...
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
I don’t know what will happen but Zoom Fatigue is real. There will be less time spent in offices to be sure but reports of their death is exaggerated. Back in the late 90s, when I was a trainee solicitor, the head of the department I qualified into worked from home 2 or more days a week so it was possible even then - but he wasn’t popular. Even after I qualified in 2000 I could dial into my work email and work from hoke that way but felt out of the loop. I’m going in for the first time next week or the week after as I have a physical trial bundle to prepare.
Some will continue to use it if they had long commutes, itll be hard to tell them they MUST return, but I agree with the fatigue. And while we all moan about work for some getting in to office is a break from home, with the random casual socialisation it entails.
The great thing about the 1990s was that almost everyone thought new technology would make life better for ordinary people. Regrettably that doesnt seem to have happened (so far).
Try suggesting to any teenagers you know that they don’t need their phones...
On topic, good article. I suspect May will be a mixed bag and reflect the national picture.
Both Labour and the Tories will point to their good results, and the fact the Tories should be doing far worse if they're on course to be ejected from office will be glossed over.
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
The problem with this paragraph is its disconnection from reality.
(lots of whining about bollocks)
This is why Labour are now lost. Your values and not shared by your former voters.
TBH If Labour are bad because the right wing newspapers think their bad then I have some bad news, they have been bad for a while and before Corbyn.
TBH just by polling and elections more Labour voters share my views than yours.
Labour had way more votes in 2017 than any other election I have been able to vote in, and 2019 comes pretty close as well.
Know I now what you are going to say, young whipper snapper let me tell you about Tony Blair back in the days of yore when mobile phones and the internet were more rare than normal...
To which I would point out the world has moved on a lot since then, a couple of decades give or take for one. Also if we are allowed to go far back in time I am going to claim Atlee, fought in the army, like my dad and Clive Lewis, nationalisation crazy, puts Corbyn to shame in that regard. You could claim him to the right in some places but undoubtedly to the left in others.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Yes, it was noteworthy that in 2017 Corbyn's vote held up well in traditional Labour areas, indeed gained a few seats in the NW. Clearly not the anathema he became in 2019, where not just Brexit, but also the leader went down badly on the doorstep.
Labour Lefties need to understand that Corbyn is yesterday's man, and Labour centrists need to recapture that enthusiasm that change is possible. "Fun with Flags" is anathema to those suspicious of nationalism, and just looks phoney to nationalists. Labour will not win by aping the Tories. If that is the manifesto then voters will go for the real thing.
You can always find people on twitter but I am not sure there are actually that many lefties who actually want Corbyn to lead Labour, I mean I want the man to have some peace and quiet personally, nice to see the newspapers not camped outside his house every day... wonder what deal they have with Starmer where he mostly gets peace and quiet....
You don't have to have Corbyn, just left wing policies, Corbyn drove a good part of that vote with aspects of himself but a large part of it was because of a left wing offering.
I think that's right. Many on the left, who supported the policies, were not fans of Corbyn personally; they were sceptical about his leadership abilities and his ability to be an effective PM. The Corbyn cult was noisy but not as large as it seemed, even with the party.
Incidentally, once Starmer starts developing a policy offer I don't think he will tack to the right as much as you fear. The patriotic stuff is symbolic, rather than indicative of policy.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I say this as a worker in IT.
From my experience, I am constantly amazed that any IT worker doesn't function as a self employed consultant. Especially on retail projects, the day rates are $$$$$$$$$$$
About a decade ago I got a glorious wake up working for a firm. We were a contracting firm. I was part of a 2 man team working for an investment bank. The other team member was moved off the project by my firm. My firm had a contractual obligation to supply two devs. The skill set needed was niche. My firm hired a contractor on day rate to fill the gap. I knew exactly how much the minimum day rate for the skillset needed was at let me tell you it was more than triple my salary.
EDIT: As for why everyone doesn't do it - you often end up in shit projects that are no fun. Also the GFC was a real tough time for contractors - having you rate cut 40% overnight and the market flooded with senior devs desperate for a job gives people pause to this day.
Yeh. I can understand the latter.
One chap I was mates with on a project used to do 6 months on, 6 months travelling. The money was huge. It made up for the sometimes crap projects in his mind.
I remember a similar epiphany as a management consultant on an IT project. I could have done the same job as one of the consultants in the IT side, and earned many tens of multiples of what I was earning....
Morning. I see BoZo's biggest fan is up with the lark.
Personally, I cannot stand the slovenly buffoon with a penchant for fancy dress photo opportunities. Its like watching the Generation Game at times, and sometimes worse.
The photo ops are a bit silly but not sure how North Korean references make you the bigger man here. Unless you genuinely think no one but Boris has ever done photo ops it's an odd thing to get so worked up about.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
I don’t know what will happen but Zoom Fatigue is real. There will be less time spent in offices to be sure but reports of their death is exaggerated. Back in the late 90s, when I was a trainee solicitor, the head of the department I qualified into worked from home 2 or more days a week so it was possible even then - but he wasn’t popular. Even after I qualified in 2000 I could dial into my work email and work from hoke that way but felt out of the loop. I’m going in for the first time next week or the week after as I have a physical trial bundle to prepare.
Some will continue to use it if they had long commutes, itll be hard to tell them they MUST return, but I agree with the fatigue. And while we all moan about work for some getting in to office is a break from home, with the random casual socialisation it entails.
The group of people I find most annoying are long distance commuters who moan about it - the time, the cost of train tickets (yes, inflation means they go up - we get it), the overcrowding. The solution is to not. live. so. far. away. Its not like its rocket science or learning Mandaring....
The look of bewilderment in that long stand was priceless. But it’s simple, Virat. You played down the wrong line to an otherwise quite normal ball.
Bizarre so far. Nohit’s looked in no trouble, thrashing the ball everywhere with disdain, and yet of the others even Pujara found life hard on this pitch. Can only conclude it’s because Sharma is playing shots, so Pant and Sundar will be dangerous.
Rohit has played a few false strokes and got away with them, but he's also played some wonderful shots and punished the bad ball. He's a great player.
Anybody that has layed the draw in this match will be feeling smug right now. Even at 11s I'd be a layer. Can't see this even going to a fifth day.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
I don’t know what will happen but Zoom Fatigue is real. There will be less time spent in offices to be sure but reports of their death is exaggerated. Back in the late 90s, when I was a trainee solicitor, the head of the department I qualified into worked from home 2 or more days a week so it was possible even then - but he wasn’t popular. Even after I qualified in 2000 I could dial into my work email and work from hoke that way but felt out of the loop. I’m going in for the first time next week or the week after as I have a physical trial bundle to prepare.
Some will continue to use it if they had long commutes, itll be hard to tell them they MUST return, but I agree with the fatigue. And while we all moan about work for some getting in to office is a break from home, with the random casual socialisation it entails.
Those who live in cities, close to their offices, are those less likely to have room to work from home. The WFH debate is slightly elitist and favours empty nest Boomers who can work from their kids old bedrooms. Millennials and, to a lesser extent, Gen Xers don’t have the housing stock to be able to work from home as effectively. And the youngest boomers are still only in their mid 50s.
England have significantly restricted the run rate here since tea but a breakthrough does not seem imminent.
It was a good toss to win.
Much as I love cricket, the idea that a five day contest is swung decisively before a ball is bowled is something of a weakness. Why can't they have a toss before game one and then alternate? Or, in the spirit of cricket, have the visiting side decide for the first test and thereafter alternate.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
So what you are saying is Labour should completely disregard why they put on votes somewhere they have been losing them for 20 years in a seat they want to win back?!
I think you have a point but I am not sure it is a very good one. I don't think anybody of note is suggesting you put Corbyn as leader but ignoring why you gained votes somewhere you want to gain votes is either incompetence or because it might get in the way of doing a Labour 1980s re-enactment.
Labour put on votes in almost every constituency in 2017 as part of their 9.6 point national rise.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I say this as a worker in IT.
From my experience, I am constantly amazed that any IT worker doesn't function as a self employed consultant. Especially on retail projects, the day rates are $$$$$$$$$$$
About a decade ago I got a glorious wake up working for a firm. We were a contracting firm. I was part of a 2 man team working for an investment bank. The other team member was moved off the project by my firm. My firm had a contractual obligation to supply two devs. The skill set needed was niche. My firm hired a contractor on day rate to fill the gap. I knew exactly how much the minimum day rate for the skillset needed was at let me tell you it was more than triple my salary.
EDIT: As for why everyone doesn't do it - you often end up in shit projects that are no fun. Also the GFC was a real tough time for contractors - having you rate cut 40% overnight and the market flooded with senior devs desperate for a job gives people pause to this day.
I think many of us will have seen the spectacle of redundancies, followed by the hiring of consultants paid more than employees who no longer have knowledge or capacity to get things done.
Bonus points if the consultant is one of the people who took voluntary redundancy as part of cost saving, so they go nowhere but get paid more.
Getting unions to represent Amazon and call centre workers would be a good start.
They should unionise IT workers. That seems to be an industry where there's a few people making bank, everyone else is wanking for pennies and nobody's in a union.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
Who are you counting as low-paid IT workers? Every single IT worker I know makes good money. They’re all against unions because they get paid according to ability, with the very good ones making serious cash.
They think they are but given the incredible profits of IT companies they clearly aren't.
I say this as a worker in IT.
From my experience, I am constantly amazed that any IT worker doesn't function as a self employed consultant. Especially on retail projects, the day rates are $$$$$$$$$$$
About a decade ago I got a glorious wake up working for a firm. We were a contracting firm. I was part of a 2 man team working for an investment bank. The other team member was moved off the project by my firm. My firm had a contractual obligation to supply two devs. The skill set needed was niche. My firm hired a contractor on day rate to fill the gap. I knew exactly how much the minimum day rate for the skillset needed was at let me tell you it was more than triple my salary.
EDIT: As for why everyone doesn't do it - you often end up in shit projects that are no fun. Also the GFC was a real tough time for contractors - having you rate cut 40% overnight and the market flooded with senior devs desperate for a job gives people pause to this day.
Yeh. I can understand the latter.
One chap I was mates with on a project used to do 6 months on, 6 months travelling. The money was huge. It made up for the sometimes crap projects in his mind.
I remember a similar epiphany as a management consultant on an IT project. I could have done the same job as one of the consultants in the IT side, and earned many tens of multiples of what I was earning....
I knew someone like that too, he did infrastructure-level networking stuff for telecoms, and could get twice as much work as he wanted at some ridiculous rate like £1,500 a day. He’d disappear to Portugual with his golf clubs at the beginning of June, and we’d see him again at the end of September!
"A generation of young children have been told to be fearful of close contact with others. Make no mistake - we won't be able to snap our fingers and erase these deep-seated changes."
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
Most of my job is essentially solitary creative work so WFH suits me for that. But, 20-30% of my role is collaborative. Zoom/Teams is awful - rubbish. For that stuff, I can’t wait to get back to the office.
I’ll WFO 2-4 days a fortnight when I can. Can’t wait!
The photo ops are a bit silly but not sure how North Korean references make you the bigger man here. Unless you genuinely think no one but Boris has ever done photo ops it's an odd thing to get so worked up about.
How many former Prime Ministers used taxpayer money to take photos of their dog?
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
The problem with this paragraph is its disconnection from reality.
(lots of whining about bollocks)
This is why Labour are now lost. Your values and not shared by your former voters.
TBH If Labour are bad because the right wing newspapers think their bad then I have some bad news, they have been bad for a while and before Corbyn.
TBH just by polling and elections more Labour voters share my views than yours.
Labour had way more votes in 2017 than any other election I have been able to vote in, and 2019 comes pretty close as well.
Know I now what you are going to say, young whipper snapper let me tell you about Tony Blair back in the days of yore when mobile phones and the internet were more rare than normal...
To which I would point out the world has moved on a lot since then, a couple of decades give or take for one. Also if we are allowed to go far back in time I am going to claim Atlee, fought in the army, like my dad and Clive Lewis, nationalisation crazy, puts Corbyn to shame in that regard. You could claim him to the right in some places but undoubtedly to the left in others.
Does the Labour Party exist to be in power, to be in charge of the efforts to make people’s lives better?
If so, their best election result since WWII was in 1997, followed by 2001.
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
So what you are saying is Labour should completely disregard why they put on votes somewhere they have been losing them for 20 years in a seat they want to win back?!
I think you have a point but I am not sure it is a very good one. I don't think anybody of note is suggesting you put Corbyn as leader but ignoring why you gained votes somewhere you want to gain votes is either incompetence or because it might get in the way of doing a Labour 1980s re-enactment.
Labour put on votes in almost every constituency in 2017 as part of their 9.6 point national rise.
Which was my original point.
It is certainly worth looking at the reasons for the 2017 'surprise' (many of which surely concern the Tories rather than Labour), but the relatively poorer performance in the so-called red wall was evident even then.
England have significantly restricted the run rate here since tea but a breakthrough does not seem imminent.
It was a good toss to win.
Much as I love cricket, the idea that a five day contest is swung decisively before a ball is bowled is something of a weakness. Why can't they have a toss before game one and then alternate? Or, in the spirit of cricket, have the visiting side decide for the first test and thereafter alternate.
Or alternatively the visiting team always get to choose. We would then see very different wickets and better cricket.
The photo ops are a bit silly but not sure how North Korean references make you the bigger man here. Unless you genuinely think no one but Boris has ever done photo ops it's an odd thing to get so worked up about.
How many former Prime Ministers used taxpayer money to take photos of their dog?
Why are you not worked up about it?
I am angry that taxpayer money is used for that purpose Scott. Even Guido has criticised Boris for that. What does that have to do with saying comparing photo op trips to north Korea is silly when politicians are well known for such silly photo ops?
You're doing that thing where you assume anyone making a point you dont like must be a fan of Boris. I simply prefer to criticise him for being, to my mind, a bad prime minister.
Were you not paying attention? May was rubbish, but thankfully they got rid of her and....
Oh.
Notably, her local results were pretty darn good for the 2017 cycle as has been noted. A helpful reminder that local results dont really mean much sometimes.
I think that's right. Many on the left, who supported the policies, were not fans of Corbyn personally; they were sceptical about his leadership abilities and his ability to be an effective PM. The Corbyn cult was noisy but not as large as it seemed, even with the party.
Incidentally, once Starmer starts developing a policy offer I don't think he will tack to the right as much as you fear. The patriotic stuff is symbolic, rather than indicative of policy.
I (obviously) liked Corbyn personally but it was the policies for me, I think the vast majority of Corbyn supporters would have easily transferred over to someone actually offering 'Corbynism without Corbyn' as it was termed, I think everyone knew the game that was being played with people stating that without meaning it at all.
Plenty of pro Corbyn people I follow on twitter and my own personal reaction to Starmer was okay not my choice but be reasonable give him a chance and his leadership campaign was sorta left wing as well, some people (quite a decent number) I follow pro Corbyn voted for him as leader over RLB. Novara media were I'd almost say cautiously optimistic, the actual immediate anti Starmer reaction was very small.
The problem is (we can argue it is perception or whatever) Starmers leadership has consisted of punching left and breaking pledges he made in the leadership campaign to the left. The anti Starmer mood from even people who voted for Starmer on my twitter is evident. If you are left wing at this point why would you trust Starmer?
Almost regardless of what happens from this point on I can't see myself voting Labour next election..
I hear that ferry freight levels have returned to normal. Was this the last Remain dog that turns out not to have barked?
As I responded to Charles earlier there seems to be some rather large questions about the volume of freight as opposed to the volume of trucks. Most of the stuff that used to come into the UK as a consolidated load then get split off for ROI is now bypassing us. Our exports on various industries has dropped (to minimal levels in some cases), and both manufacturers and logistics are still screaming about their inability to economically trade.
And this is the quiet period before all those 3rd party rules we wanted phase in. Such as veterinary certificates for Chocolate biscuits. To ask you the same question as Charles & FU refused to answer earlier, will you Mortimer regard it as a Brexit triumph when business learns to accept the lower volume levels and much higher costs that all this pointless red tape applies?
I personally need our borders to function. I represent an importer into the UK. Pointing out all the areas where it isn't working isn't me wishing it to fail and me to lose my contract. Its wanting to show where the myriad problems are so that they can be resolved.
An empty truck crossing the border when it used to be full is not a triumph for anyone.
The photo ops are a bit silly but not sure how North Korean references make you the bigger man here. Unless you genuinely think no one but Boris has ever done photo ops it's an odd thing to get so worked up about.
How many former Prime Ministers used taxpayer money to take photos of their dog?
Why are you not worked up about it?
Is this the stupidest story of the week?
The government has a comms team on staff, which in the modern world includes social media people doing photography and videography stuff.
Last week, with a pandemic and a snowstorm somewhat limiting the options for travelling anywhere, they took some cute photos of the No.10 dog playing in the snow.
The photos had a marginal cost of precisicely nothing, because the people are all on staff anyway. Even if they were getting paid £50 an hour, there’s not more than half an hour’s time involved.
I think that's right. Many on the left, who supported the policies, were not fans of Corbyn personally; they were sceptical about his leadership abilities and his ability to be an effective PM. The Corbyn cult was noisy but not as large as it seemed, even with the party.
Incidentally, once Starmer starts developing a policy offer I don't think he will tack to the right as much as you fear. The patriotic stuff is symbolic, rather than indicative of policy.
I (obviously) liked Corbyn personally but it was the policies for me, I think the vast majority of Corbyn supporters would have easily transferred over to someone actually offering 'Corbynism without Corbyn' as it was termed, I think everyone knew the game that was being played with people stating that without meaning it at all.
Plenty of pro Corbyn people I follow on twitter and my own personal reaction to Starmer was okay not my choice but be reasonable give him a chance and his leadership campaign was sorta left wing as well, some people (quite a decent number) I follow pro Corbyn voted for him as leader over RLB. Novara media were I'd almost say cautiously optimistic, the actual immediate anti Starmer reaction was very small.
The problem is (we can argue it is perception or whatever) Starmers leadership has consisted of punching left and breaking pledges he made in the leadership campaign to the left. The anti Starmer mood from even people who voted for Starmer on my twitter is evident. If you are left wing at this point why would you trust Starmer?
Almost regardless of what happens from this point on I can't see myself voting Labour next election..
Good to see The Jezziah. Good to get a view of Starmer from that angle from more people.
I am angry that taxpayer money is used for that purpose Scott. Even Guido has criticised Boris for that. What does that have to do with saying comparing photo op trips to north Korea is silly when politicians are well known for such silly photo ops?
You're doing that thing where you assume anyone making a point you dont like must be a fan of Boris. I simply prefer to criticise him for being, to my mind, a bad prime minister.
Yes, he is a terrible Prime Minister, but 3 government employees whose job is solely to produce hagiographic images of the Glorious Leader (and his dog) is slightly North Korean, is it not?
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
I don’t know what will happen but Zoom Fatigue is real. There will be less time spent in offices to be sure but reports of their death is exaggerated. Back in the late 90s, when I was a trainee solicitor, the head of the department I qualified into worked from home 2 or more days a week so it was possible even then - but he wasn’t popular. Even after I qualified in 2000 I could dial into my work email and work from hoke that way but felt out of the loop. I’m going in for the first time next week or the week after as I have a physical trial bundle to prepare.
Some will continue to use it if they had long commutes, itll be hard to tell them they MUST return, but I agree with the fatigue. And while we all moan about work for some getting in to office is a break from home, with the random casual socialisation it entails.
The group of people I find most annoying are long distance commuters who moan about it - the time, the cost of train tickets (yes, inflation means they go up - we get it), the overcrowding. The solution is to not. live. so. far. away. Its not like its rocket science or learning Mandaring....
Which is fine if you can afford the higher. cost. of. housing. closer. in. Its not like its rocket science or learning Cantonese...
As for Labour, they appear to me to be lost. What is the point of Labour?
The Labour Party, for some time, have needed to get back to their roots. While to preserve the Red Wall I don’t think the Tories will prune back much employment protection legislation - the Working Time Directive and TUPE being the main legislation deriving entirely from EU directives as opposed to UK Acts of Parliament and the former has been in their sights since it was implemented, The employment law workaround that Uber, Amazon, Pimlico Plumbers et al have found is to make everyone self employed contractors. Workers in the gig economy are an increasingly exploited class. That unfairness is something that can resonate with Joe Voter more than the culture war trap the right increasingly exploit to great advantage.
I don't want to bang on about Corbyn... but you know... my username...
In 2017 in almost all these red wall places Labour put on votes, in a lot of them less than the Tories. Labour at this point had things to say about gig economy workers as well.
One very real problem I wonder about is if all those Labour MPs who helped spread the message that the Labour party (at that time) hated the country, hated soldiers loved the enemy etc. salted the ground for themselves and helped to an extent to exacerbate the culture war they now can't fight. If you look at the vote share in Northern England red wall constituencies if has been going down for a long time (with probably some of those reasons not being realistically fixable) 2017 was the one deviation from a long downward trend.
Realistically nobody will actually be interested in this data point because Corbyn led the party at the time and that would get in the way of the Labour right doing their whole 80's re-enactment thing..
Just pulling up Mansfield, as the red wall seat of choice, you are right that in 2017 Labour put on 5% there. The problem being that Labour put on 9% nationally, hence there was still an adverse relative swing there. That, and the fact that Corbyn led in 2019 as well, would appear to suggest you don't really have a point?
So what you are saying is Labour should completely disregard why they put on votes somewhere they have been losing them for 20 years in a seat they want to win back?!
I think you have a point but I am not sure it is a very good one. I don't think anybody of note is suggesting you put Corbyn as leader but ignoring why you gained votes somewhere you want to gain votes is either incompetence or because it might get in the way of doing a Labour 1980s re-enactment.
Labour put on votes in almost every constituency in 2017 as part of their 9.6 point national rise.
Yes on June the 9th I believe..
I have to wonder why someone would want to disregard the reasons they gained votes in a seat they had been losing them for 20 years which as you point out was in 2017 and part of a large 9.6 point national rise.
Morning. I see BoZo's biggest fan is up with the lark.
Personally, I cannot stand the slovenly buffoon with a penchant for fancy dress photo opportunities. Its like watching the Generation Game at times, and sometimes worse.
Morning. I see BoZo's biggest fan is up with the lark.
Personally, I cannot stand the slovenly buffoon with a penchant for fancy dress photo opportunities. Its like watching the Generation Game at times, and sometimes worse.
Up here in Buchan its still freezing cold. Lots of snow on the ground though the roads and pavements are clear. Went for a walk last night, very little to hear apart from the stream, a fantastic display of stars overhead. So very different to suburban Teesside.
Entertainingly half the village seems to know we are here and that we were coming. OK so the house is one of the feature ones and the previous owners had been here 30 years, and we already had my brother's family up here.
Its still quite nice though - chatting with the lady in the shop and she said "my little boy likes to run in your side garden, I've been trying to tell him he can't do now its been sold". Naah, let him run around, its no problem.
Sorry to be a little boring... can I suggest that you write a letter to the lady in the shop giving her permission to let her little boy do so... otherwise you risk creating a right of public access (IANAL)
The government has a comms team on staff, which in the modern world includes social media people doing photography and videography stuff.
BoZo has staff to take photos of him.
He paid someone (with our money) to take a photo of him resigning against a deal which was significantly better than the one he later signed.
This is not normal Government comms.
That was a story from three years ago.
I was referring to the one from last week, when a member of staff with little else to do because of weather and pandemic, spent half an hour in a snowy garden with the dog.
Anecdata. Every single one of my Zoom or Teams calls with an employer client in the last two weeks has had at least one participant logging in from the office.
Amongst those of my mates who found WFH a great novelty at the start, not a single person wants it to continue.
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
Most of my job is essentially solitary creative work so WFH suits me for that. But, 20-30% of my role is collaborative. Zoom/Teams is awful - rubbish. For that stuff, I can’t wait to get back to the office.
I’ll WFO 2-4 days a fortnight when I can. Can’t wait!
For my team - everyone is keen on keeping WFH. But having office days at least once a week.
The suggestion is also that, for new joiners, we would have a "surge" - go into the office full time for a couple of weeks.
I was referring to the one from last week, when a member of staff with little else to do because of weather and pandemic, spend half an hour in a snowy garden with the dog.
If staff photographers have so little to do, why are we paying for 3 of them?
I was referring to the one from last week, when a member of staff with little else to do because of weather and pandemic, spend half an hour in a snowy garden with the dog.
If staff photographers have so little to do, why are we paying for 3 of them?
Because it was a snow day, and there’s a pandemic on. Should government be making creative people redundant during a pandemic, or sending them home unpaid when it’s quiet?
Labour is still the party of the trades unions and of public sector workers. It has retreated to appealing to its historic core vote, and it no longer has an appetite to appeal to the wider public. What can Labour now say to the self-employed and people who work in or own small businesses? They have suffered badly in the lockdown.
Labour has little to offer to the nation beyond its core supporters. I cannot see how they will return to power, other than to renegotiate the UK's terms of business with the EU.
Labour is the party of the young and youngish in a country which has gotten older.
There is a lot Labour offer the self-employed... a furlough scheme that didn't leave so many out, the tories tried to raise their taxes, a pragmatic approach on EU relations...
The problem is the retired. They need to do better with pensioners somehow.
As I have it, compared to a generation ago we all work about 5 years more which is gradually becoming 10 years more.
And we live about 10 years more, which may be about to go slightly into perceived reverse if not adjusted for Covid.
Comments
Labour lost comfortably in 2017. You lot pushed this myth that the performance was a triumph, that if only a few thousand people in a few dozen seats voted the other way then there could have been a triumphant Labour+every other party government which could have brought about World Peace. It was and is rampant bollocks. For all that May screwed her campaign up, she increased the Tory vote by 20%. As we then saw in 2019 that trend continued as traditional Labour voters turned out in their droves to vote Tory.
Corbyn - and all of you in his cult - utterly destroyed the party. Voters who were LLLLLLL across the board voting Tory because Corbyn hated them, their country, their basic beliefs. At which point hard left entryists literally started jabbing the finger in faces and arguing.
The party is doing the "80s re-enactment" because the only way to regain the trust of working people is to purge the lunatics. And unlike Kinnock, Starmer has provben that he is shit at that as well. Corbyn - and all those around him - brought the party into disrepute over the EHRC debacle. Which means they can be expelled by the GC. Not have the whip removed from only Corbyn so that so-called Labour supporters can pay for Him to sue their own party.
Purge the lot. Then you all fuck off back to your lunatic Socialist Unity splinter groups and the party had a chance to be relevant again. Won't happen. Because Keith is a bit shit.
I spent my time at uni on JSTOR, not MSN.
The annoying thing is there are half a dozen very simple ways to improve the situation. For example, anyone who has worked over twenty hours a week on a ZHC for a single employer for six months should be given the option to move onto a full contract. Or somebody who has a continuous record of 52 weeks work including holiday time for one employer must be given notice periods and redundancy pay equivalent to an average of the FTE of someone on a mandated hours contract across those 52 weeks.
Neither would be difficult and both would improve matters at say Amazon immeasurably.
Entertainingly half the village seems to know we are here and that we were coming. OK so the house is one of the feature ones and the previous owners had been here 30 years, and we already had my brother's family up here.
Its still quite nice though - chatting with the lady in the shop and she said "my little boy likes to run in your side garden, I've been trying to tell him he can't do now its been sold". Naah, let him run around, its no problem.
As new arrivals can I ask that you give some consideration to the collapse in quality in Scottish education which has deteriorated consistently in the last 10 years; the dangerous position of our Universities who have lived off English students paying fees whilst restricting the access for Scottish students, the appalling state of Police Scotland; the disgraceful waste of public money at Bifab in Fife, at Ferguson Shipyards, at Prestwick Airport, on compensating those wrong prosecuted, I could go on all day.
Please think about the level of dishonesty and cronyism disclosed around Nicola by the Salmond fiasco, the corruption of our Civil Service and the apparent inability of our democratic systems to work in a one party state.
Educate yourself about the legislative intentions of a new SNP government such as the ridiculous Hate Speech bill, the treatment of witches in the middle ages and the never ending obsession with trans rights.
Scotland has a government that is obsessed with making points about independence, who spend their time and energy fabricating grievances and who do so little to address the underlying weakness of the Scottish economy. Viable independence, ironically, drifts ever further out of sight as we increase our dependency upon UK subsidy to an unhealthy degree. Scotland needs a change alright but the SNP is not it.
In any given election it isn't just about how you perform. Its about how the other candidates perform. A basic rule of adding that hard left activists desperately tried to pretend wasn't true whilst making hilarious claims about how 2017 was Labour's best result since 1945.
Somebody can present a contextless few word quote from some random person and a picture from something like GuidoFawkes and I would have to do like 30 minutes research to find the context and spend an hour arguing a point logically and at absolute best we'd just be moving on to the next contextless rubbish from a questionable source.
I've heard Bastani talk about this (although from distant memory now and about something I don't really care massively about so bit unsure) the whole idea about him being a Tory is him pictured at some Tory event? is that right?
I think his claim is he was helping a friend or there in some capacity other than as a Tory. Now unless there is some other evidence that really isn't a lot to go on. We also know he took part in 'anti-capitalism' protests and voted Green prior to Corbyn as Labour leader. He is also a young man whose dad was a Muslim and grew up at a time when the left opposed the war in Iraq and a lot of young people and I would expect in even greater numbers by young Muslim people (although no actual evidence of his view at the time)
Neither of us can say for definite but on the balance of evidence I would say he probably wasn't.
The hard left with their blissful purity of opposition is the closest Labour have come to government in quite some time, surely it is your wing of the party who prefers the blissful purity of opposition? Your guys wouldn't stop whining when Labour led in the polls under the left. They are happy now to be losing under the right.
As for the Labour right they are missing someone with Blair's talent but they are also missing the fact it isn't the electorate has moved on, it isn't currently 1980 and the next leader isn't going to be taking over in the 90's what worked a few decades ago isn't going to work now.
The SF novel Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod give some insight on how this can be achieved with the 'Information Workers of the World Wide Web' union.
A Danish or Dutch style union for serving military personnel would be a good idea too.
To compare the leader of a Western democracy in similar terms to a genocidal dictator is utterly ill-judged
I remember moving down from London, driving onto the ferry pursued by the removal van, and arriving here in the murk one very foggy November morning. On the doormat was a card from the postman for a package; at the callers' office the person behind the counter said "you must be the new person from London" and proceeded to tell me pretty much everything that the previous owner would have known about me. Walking back up the hill a random passer-by proceeded to do the same.
In London my neighbour didn't even know I was moving away, and I'd only spoken to him twice in five years.
I imagine a fair few of the lockdown refugees from the cities are having similar experiences.
This is a real cold patch though. I don't recall the like over the last 10 years. More snow expected tomorrow.
I went for a walk yesterday afternoon. It was absolutely glorious. The sun was glinting on the white hills and the snow was firm and dry under foot. Enjoy it.
On the other policy issues I hear you. But how is any of that different to elsewhere? I have been a Scottish resident for just a few days. But the issues you describe are the same as I left behind in Teesside.
Local schools a badly funded basket-case, with a genuine battle to save our local high school where the taxpayer built a fantastic new building then had it forcibly privatised to an academy chain who brought it to ruin.
English universities live off Chinese students paying fees - our (previously) local Durham University campus had latterly become a foundation year institution entirely for Chinese students paying £lots for Durham University and being dumped in Thornaby.
Cleveland Police so under-funded that we had 3 full time officers per shift covering a vast area with the obvious surge in crime and ASB. To say nothing of the succession of disastrous Chief Constable appointments.
Wastes of Public Money? Ben Houchen International Airport, nationalised by the Tory mayor so that the taxpayer is now liable for its massive loss-making.
The issues you describe are neither unique to Scotland nor to the SNP.
You don't have to have Corbyn, just left wing policies, Corbyn drove a good part of that vote with aspects of himself but a large part of it was because of a left wing offering.
Plus a so called Labour voter who now worships Johnson and comes on here every morning and repeats his worship.
Jeremy Corbyn allied himself his whole life with the causes of Terrorism and Anti-Semitism. That isn't spin, or "contextless" quotes, thats just fact. How do we know its fact? From the things that Jeremy said, where he said them, with whom he said them.
If Jeremy was so passionately against anti-semitism why did he spend decades sharing platform with screaming anti-semites? Why did he sit as an active participant in a pro-Palestinian movement that openly committed anti-semitic attacks against Jews globally and in his own party? If Jeremy was so passionately against violence why did he ally himself with so many terrorist groups? From the IRA to Hesbollah, you don't find yourself accidentally at a wreath laying ceremony for terrorists who tried to slaughter Israelis (anti-semitism again) and "I didn't participate" is laughable.
The idea that the man helped bring peace to the middle east or Northern Ireland is literally incredible. You bring peace by speaking to BOTH sides, not exclusively the one side only. Being bezzies with the IRA is not negotiating peace. People could see right through the excuses you lot were making, "its all right wing lies" is crap when we can watch the video of him sharing hate platforms with terrorists decade after decade.
And then we have his patriotism. Taking the side of Russia after they tried to top their defectors in Salisbury. The automatic assumption that his friends in Russia can't be blamed despite the clear evidence. His absurd reactions to the flag and national anthem. These aren't made up smear stories. They are things we witnessed agog.
This is why Labour are now lost. Your values and not shared by your former voters.
On schools the main problem is that the number one priority of the SNP is not to rock the boat with the teaching unions, specifically the EIS. What they want they get. The result is that we have persisted in the curriculum for excellence agenda despite overwhelming evidence that it has damaged the quality of education (see PISA results).
We have sought to remove any objective or external marking from our college system and then incentivised them the pass everyone, even if they don't turn up, devaluing the courses to the point they actually decrease employability rather than increase it. This has spread to the schools over the last 2 years as a result of the pandemic and creates a dangerous precedent. We are restricting the choices available in schools so that economics, for example, is no longer available in almost any state school in Scotland. The gap in performance between private schools and state schools, which really didn't exist when I was at school 40 odd years ago, is now massive and growing.
There are no magic wands in respect of the funding of schools but funding is actually one of the lesser problems faced by a system that is no longer producing the work force we are going to need in the future.
Imagine how a pandemic goes down in the ‘90s, with no broadband, no laptops or mobile phones, and no mRNA vaccines?
Worldwide, the rate at which people are escaping poverty has never been higher.
You have everything you have wanted and still you whine and complain.
To be fair to Starmer even with the best will in the world what more do you want from him? he cannot actually start a campaign of sterilisation against people who want nationalised railways until he gets into office.
The party isn't doing a 80's re-enactment because it wants to win, do you want me to get you the at the time private quotes from the Labour right in response to Labour doing better than expected.....
It isn't disappointment we didn't do better.
Also just to correct you there, working people actually voted for Labour in 2017 in greater numbers, it was the people in retirement age who did it for 'us'.
I think when you say working people you mean people over the age of 50?
Never quite understood the strange idea that millions of not old people votes are bad to get and you only want the older ones. Is it because the younger voters don't share your Blairite views?
TBH it was you Blairites who are more interested in rich donors than normal people that destroyed the Labour party. This may shock you but the Labour party wasn't actually set up to serve the rich...
I've done WFH. I've done WFO. I've done working from a clients office. Frankly, unless I'm writing a report to a deadline or making an excel model, I'm always more efficient in an office.
https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/1360514595950104576
A total of 300 volunteers aged between six and 17 are taking part in the trial
Phoebe Southworth" (£)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/13/oxford-testing-vaccine-children-today/
I think you have a point but I am not sure it is a very good one. I don't think anybody of note is suggesting you put Corbyn as leader but ignoring why you gained votes somewhere you want to gain votes is either incompetence or because it might get in the way of doing a Labour 1980s re-enactment.
https://twitter.com/HarrietSergeant/status/1360520209044537347
I say this as a worker in IT.
It is classic nonsense futurology.
Sure, there may be more flexibility especially for more established staff. Two or three days a week at home perhaps for some. But millions all WFH all the time. Nope.
Some of the staff are regular employees of the outsourcer, with "pay for performance" who can double their salary if they deliver.
Others are TUPEd from the department, with union negotiated salary but crucially keep their pension rights
As noted it's all about the parties setting expectations and I find it really hard to see what a reasonable expectation would be. Labour winning a few more mayoraltys seems a must, but other than that what makes a good, ok or bad night I'm not sure of.
EDIT: As for why everyone doesn't do it - you often end up in shit projects that are no fun. Also the GFC was a real tough time for contractors - having you rate cut 40% overnight and the market flooded with senior devs desperate for a job gives people pause to this day.
Could they be the new Lib Dems as the "posh" opposition to the Tories in some local authority areas?
Both Labour and the Tories will point to their good results, and the fact the Tories should be doing far worse if they're on course to be ejected from office will be glossed over.
TBH just by polling and elections more Labour voters share my views than yours.
Labour had way more votes in 2017 than any other election I have been able to vote in, and 2019 comes pretty close as well.
Know I now what you are going to say, young whipper snapper let me tell you about Tony Blair back in the days of yore when mobile phones and the internet were more rare than normal...
To which I would point out the world has moved on a lot since then, a couple of decades give or take for one. Also if we are allowed to go far back in time I am going to claim Atlee, fought in the army, like my dad and Clive Lewis, nationalisation crazy, puts Corbyn to shame in that regard. You could claim him to the right in some places but undoubtedly to the left in others.
Incidentally, once Starmer starts developing a policy offer I don't think he will tack to the right as much as you fear. The patriotic stuff is symbolic, rather than indicative of policy.
One chap I was mates with on a project used to do 6 months on, 6 months travelling. The money was huge. It made up for the sometimes crap projects in his mind.
I remember a similar epiphany as a management consultant on an IT project. I could have done the same job as one of the consultants in the IT side, and earned many tens of multiples of what I was earning....
Much as I love cricket, the idea that a five day contest is swung decisively before a ball is bowled is something of a weakness. Why can't they have a toss before game one and then alternate? Or, in the spirit of cricket, have the visiting side decide for the first test and thereafter alternate.
Bonus points if the consultant is one of the people who took voluntary redundancy as part of cost saving, so they go nowhere but get paid more.
I’ll WFO 2-4 days a fortnight when I can. Can’t wait!
Why are you not worked up about it?
If so, their best election result since WWII was in 1997, followed by 2001.
It is certainly worth looking at the reasons for the 2017 'surprise' (many of which surely concern the Tories rather than Labour), but the relatively poorer performance in the so-called red wall was evident even then.
Oh.
You're doing that thing where you assume anyone making a point you dont like must be a fan of Boris. I simply prefer to criticise him for being, to my mind, a bad prime minister.
Plenty of pro Corbyn people I follow on twitter and my own personal reaction to Starmer was okay not my choice but be reasonable give him a chance and his leadership campaign was sorta left wing as well, some people (quite a decent number) I follow pro Corbyn voted for him as leader over RLB. Novara media were I'd almost say cautiously optimistic, the actual immediate anti Starmer reaction was very small.
The problem is (we can argue it is perception or whatever) Starmers leadership has consisted of punching left and breaking pledges he made in the leadership campaign to the left. The anti Starmer mood from even people who voted for Starmer on my twitter is evident. If you are left wing at this point why would you trust Starmer?
Almost regardless of what happens from this point on I can't see myself voting Labour next election..
And this is the quiet period before all those 3rd party rules we wanted phase in. Such as veterinary certificates for Chocolate biscuits. To ask you the same question as Charles & FU refused to answer earlier, will you Mortimer regard it as a Brexit triumph when business learns to accept the lower volume levels and much higher costs that all this pointless red tape applies?
I personally need our borders to function. I represent an importer into the UK. Pointing out all the areas where it isn't working isn't me wishing it to fail and me to lose my contract. Its wanting to show where the myriad problems are so that they can be resolved.
An empty truck crossing the border when it used to be full is not a triumph for anyone.
The government has a comms team on staff, which in the modern world includes social media people doing photography and videography stuff.
Last week, with a pandemic and a snowstorm somewhat limiting the options for travelling anywhere, they took some cute photos of the No.10 dog playing in the snow.
The photos had a marginal cost of precisicely nothing, because the people are all on staff anyway. Even if they were getting paid £50 an hour, there’s not more than half an hour’s time involved.
I have to wonder why someone would want to disregard the reasons they gained votes in a seat they had been losing them for 20 years which as you point out was in 2017 and part of a large 9.6 point national rise.
He paid someone (with our money) to take a photo of him resigning against a deal which was significantly better than the one he later signed.
This is not normal Government comms.
I was referring to the one from last week, when a member of staff with little else to do because of weather and pandemic, spent half an hour in a snowy garden with the dog.
The suggestion is also that, for new joiners, we would have a "surge" - go into the office full time for a couple of weeks.
And we live about 10 years more, which may be about to go slightly into perceived reverse if not adjusted for Covid.