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Will Paterson be the trigger for the Tories to lose their poll lead? – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited November 2021 in General
imageWill Paterson be the trigger for the Tories to lose their poll lead? – politicalbetting.com

As we all know the Tories have, except for just two polls, been ahead in every survey since the spring when the so-called vaccination bounce was happening. Could all that come to an end following BoJo’s decision to thwart action against what seems to be a clear case of paid for lobbying?

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,669
    Yes. (And first)
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,147
    Not sure this will resonate as much as Barnard Castle to be honest.

    If Paterson is going to be tried again, presumably there's a good chance the same outcome is reached.
  • GIN1138GIN1138 Posts: 20,673
    I mean the police had a revolving door on Tony Blair's Downing St. for years (though they could never actually get him on anything ;) ) - The public shrugged and carried on voting for him.

    Politicians like Blair and Boris get away with "sleaze" where others like Major, Brown and May don't... This story will have minimal impact.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,669
    One of the worst Tory MPs has been caught out and somehow the party wants to spear itself on his rusty sword. It beggars belief.

    I do understand the personal sympathy towards him (and his circumstances), but it's far, far worse now. He's going to have to swing.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866
    tlg86 said:

    Not sure this will resonate as much as Barnard Castle to be honest.

    If Paterson is going to be tried again, presumably there's a good chance the same outcome is reached.

    Yes it will be even more public next time. The story will run and run. Either he gets the same verdict and sanction, or there is a charade of a whitewash which will stink out the whole Parliament?

    Incidentally, what is the reason to put notorious friend of Russia John Whittingdale in charge of the new investigating committee?
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,760
    Clearly today’s shenanigans are deeply shameful for the conservatives, if they had any shame that is. But the problem is the less politically engaged public, I.e. the 99.9% who don’t post obsessive on pb, won’t care that much, and even if they do, they will probably think that all politicians are the same. Now that may not be fair, but that’s what happens.
    And to be honest the idea that the conservatives are uniquely bad in this doesn’t really wash. I recall the last labour government. A fair few scandals in that one too. Mandelson? Baroness Scotland? Blunket? And the SNP is not immune. Poor old Nippy has such a poor memory that she should probably be disbarred from office...
    So a terrible day, and one that will enrage many, especially on pb, but it will be a tiny ripple by the weekend for the public at large.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,688
    tlg86 said:

    Not sure this will resonate as much as Barnard Castle to be honest.

    If Paterson is going to be tried again, presumably there's a good chance the same outcome is reached.

    I think you're right (sadly). Most people will just hear "Tory sleaze" and think something like "same old MPs, they're all at it".
  • Tricky one. I think a huge amount of voters still regard criticism of Boris as a criticism of their own decision to vote for Brexit, so they can't allow Boris to fail. Having said that, Brexit has hardly been a roaring success, so Leavers might justify turning on Boris with the excuse that he was the PM who buggered up Brexit. Either way, the Patterson thing won't help.
  • Doubt it. And that's the frightening thing. Corruption will become endemic and so hard to eliminate.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,658

    Clearly today’s shenanigans are deeply shameful for the conservatives, if they had any shame that is. But the problem is the less politically engaged public, I.e. the 99.9% who don’t post obsessive on pb, won’t care that much, and even if they do, they will probably think that all politicians are the same. Now that may not be fair, but that’s what happens.
    And to be honest the idea that the conservatives are uniquely bad in this doesn’t really wash. I recall the last labour government. A fair few scandals in that one too. Mandelson? Baroness Scotland? Blunket? And the SNP is not immune. Poor old Nippy has such a poor memory that she should probably be disbarred from office...
    So a terrible day, and one that will enrage many, especially on pb, but it will be a tiny ripple by the weekend for the public at large.

    People engaged in political debate treat the whole thing like some kind of moral philosophy test. Most people like a move themselves, and couldn't care less if some politicians wet their beak from time to time.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,688
    (Continuing from my previous OT post)

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2021/11/03/former-england-star-gary-ballance-outed-yorkshire-cricketer/

    "Former England star Garry Ballance has been outed as the Yorkshire cricketer who called Azeem Rafiq a P--- in what an investigation dismissed as “banter”.

    Ballance’s name was made public following attempts to confront him over the findings of a report in which he also confessed to telling other people, “Don’t talk to him, he’s a P---”, asking, “Is that your uncle?”, when they saw bearded Asian men and saying, “Does your dad own those?” in reference to corner shops.

    Leaked extracts from the report commissioned by Yorkshire County Cricket Club also showed how Ballance – who had not been publicly identified until Wednesday – admitted recalling that Rafiq broke down in tears at one point.

    Despite this, Ballance told lawyers investigating the racism scandal to engulf the club that he had no idea he was causing offence and would have stopped had Rafiq asked."
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
  • CatMan said:

    (Continuing from my previous OT post)

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2021/11/03/former-england-star-gary-ballance-outed-yorkshire-cricketer/

    "Former England star Garry Ballance has been outed as the Yorkshire cricketer who called Azeem Rafiq a P--- in what an investigation dismissed as “banter”.

    Ballance’s name was made public following attempts to confront him over the findings of a report in which he also confessed to telling other people, “Don’t talk to him, he’s a P---”, asking, “Is that your uncle?”, when they saw bearded Asian men and saying, “Does your dad own those?” in reference to corner shops.

    Leaked extracts from the report commissioned by Yorkshire County Cricket Club also showed how Ballance – who had not been publicly identified until Wednesday – admitted recalling that Rafiq broke down in tears at one point.

    Despite this, Ballance told lawyers investigating the racism scandal to engulf the club that he had no idea he was causing offence and would have stopped had Rafiq asked."

    Not surely 'England star' is the right phrase - everyone was always demanding for him to be dropped.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    edited November 2021
    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,760

    CatMan said:

    (Continuing from my previous OT post)

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2021/11/03/former-england-star-gary-ballance-outed-yorkshire-cricketer/

    "Former England star Garry Ballance has been outed as the Yorkshire cricketer who called Azeem Rafiq a P--- in what an investigation dismissed as “banter”.

    Ballance’s name was made public following attempts to confront him over the findings of a report in which he also confessed to telling other people, “Don’t talk to him, he’s a P---”, asking, “Is that your uncle?”, when they saw bearded Asian men and saying, “Does your dad own those?” in reference to corner shops.

    Leaked extracts from the report commissioned by Yorkshire County Cricket Club also showed how Ballance – who had not been publicly identified until Wednesday – admitted recalling that Rafiq broke down in tears at one point.

    Despite this, Ballance told lawyers investigating the racism scandal to engulf the club that he had no idea he was causing offence and would have stopped had Rafiq asked."

    Not surely 'England star' is the right phrase - everyone was always demanding for him to be dropped.
    In hindsight he was not the worst of the 30 odd openers we’ve tried since Cookie and Strauss. But yes ‘star’ is a stretch...
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866
    Sheriff Tirasopol parking the bus well against Inter. Holding on to second place in the group.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,418
    edited November 2021
    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I'm going to try that defence if I'm caught speeding. 'Yes officer, I've broken the rules, technically. But it's hardly the end of the world, is it, especially in a free enterprise capitalist economy?'
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    edited November 2021

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I'm going to try that defence if I'm caught speeding. 'Yes officer, I've broken the rules, technically. But it's hardly the end of the world, is it, especially in a free enterprise capitalist economy?'
    Yes but speeding is a criminal offence if convicted of it in court, paid for lobbying is not
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

  • Before today, the best guess of the true position was C39 L35, based on the graph here;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election

    On that basis, not-quite-outlier polls with Labour ahead ought to be beginning to happen; C36L37 wouldn't be a shock for example, and today's events won't have helped the Conservatives.
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,669
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    UK>Russia in my view. I'll agree to reconsider when you go to live in Russia.
  • HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    People no longer voting for the cesspit of corruption don't have to be persuaded to vote for another party. They do you significant damage by just abstaining.

    We know abstaining is damaging. Its now a sacking offence.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    UK>Russia in my view. I'll agree to reconsider when you go to live in Russia.
    I agree, but the superiority is considerably less than it was

    Ditto America > China
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    Certainly the far right seems to prefer Russia and Eastern Europe to the West now
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420
    edited November 2021
    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,698
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I'm going to try that defence if I'm caught speeding. 'Yes officer, I've broken the rules, technically. But it's hardly the end of the world, is it, especially in a free enterprise capitalist economy?'
    Yes but speeding is a criminal offence if convicted of it in court, paid for lobbying is not
    Misrepresentation for personal gain is a criminal offence
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,600
    edited November 2021
    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go to the direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    Fair enough but then you are a LD capitalist not a full red blooded Tory capitalist, the latter are unlikely to leave the Tories and if they do would be more likely to go ReformUK than Labour or LD
  • OmniumOmnium Posts: 9,669
    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    UK>Russia in my view. I'll agree to reconsider when you go to live in Russia.
    I agree, but the superiority is considerably less than it was

    Ditto America > China
    I'd never consider living in Putin's Russia. I would consider China.

    Russia has far too forgiving press coverage, and China somewhat too hostile (although they should be utterly condemned on a few issues)
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866
    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    Certainly the far right seems to prefer Russia and Eastern Europe to the West now
    Not just the far right. The links to Russian oligarchs from the Conservative Party are quite eyebrow raising. It's not just Randox that finds excellent value for money.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420
    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go to the direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    Fair enough but then you are a LD capitalist not a full red blooded Tory capitalist, the latter are unlikely to leave the Tories and if they are would be more likely to go ReformUK than Labour or LD
    HYUFD are you saying that LD capitalists aren't crooks, but full red blooded Tory capitalists are? I wouldn't put that on your leaflets.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,216
    I follow politics enough to post here. I have no idea who this MP is. I have no idea what he is supposed to have done wrong. Nor what any hoohar about a parliamentary vote is all about. Completely passed me by. As I suspect, it has for almost all voters.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,218
    edited November 2021
    PB is a brilliant portal into the mindset into the British Right, its meanderings and its priorities. A few weeks ago the wages offered by businesses had to be state mandated because Boris said a high-wage economy was the big thing; now, because Boris has upended the law to save his mate Owen from corruption charges, anarcho-capitalism is back on the menu. Where next?
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I'm going to try that defence if I'm caught speeding. 'Yes officer, I've broken the rules, technically. But it's hardly the end of the world, is it, especially in a free enterprise capitalist economy?'
    Yes but speeding is a criminal offence if convicted of it in court, paid for lobbying is not
    Misrepresentation for personal gain is a criminal offence
    No it isn't.
  • I’ve been feeling so down lately. Hope a victory in the betting can lift my spirits a touch
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098
    moonshine said:

    I follow politics enough to post here. I have no idea who this MP is. I have no idea what he is supposed to have done wrong. Nor what any hoohar about a parliamentary vote is all about. Completely passed me by. As I suspect, it has for almost all voters.

    ...so far. But if the papers get their teeth into it, that might change.
  • "Significant majorities now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction."

    "...the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars."

    NY Times


    Not looking good for Biden.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    "Significant majorities now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction."

    "...the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars."

    NY Times


    Not looking good for Biden.

    The American Left needs to be annihilated, and driven into the sea
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    moonshine said:

    I follow politics enough to post here. I have no idea who this MP is. I have no idea what he is supposed to have done wrong. Nor what any hoohar about a parliamentary vote is all about. Completely passed me by. As I suspect, it has for almost all voters.

    I am a keen student of 20th century history, but I have no idea what happened between 1939 and 1945. Nor I suspect does anyone else.
  • kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited November 2021
    I've rarely seen the Daily Mail comments as unanimously hostile to the Tories. A terrible day for the government. Starmer apparently finally finding his voice, as the very conveniently, almost serendipitously-placed voice of the expenses scandal prosecution as DPP back in 2010.

    There is a very significant risk for the government, that particularly for older voters, this acts as a replay of the 1990's arrival of Blair in the wake of Major's sleaze era ; even more so as Starmer is doubly boosted by having acted as prosecutor in a scandal after that one that younger voters remember, too.
  • Leon said:

    "Significant majorities now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction."

    "...the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars."

    NY Times


    Not looking good for Biden.

    The American Left needs to be annihilated, and driven into the sea
    Is that you, Donald?
  • Leon said:

    "Significant majorities now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction."

    "...the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars."

    NY Times


    Not looking good for Biden.

    The American Left needs to be annihilated, and driven into the sea
    Is that you, Donald?
    Not enough capitals.
  • I've rarely seen the Daily Mail comments as unanimously hostile to the Tories. A terrible day for the government. Starmer apparently finally finding his voice, as the very conveniently, almost serendipitously-placed voice of the expenses scandal prosecution as DPP back in 2010.

    The Tory plan of using Sir Keir's DPP past as a stick to beat him with might have to be put on hold.
  • Blame the voters!!!!
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    You'd have been praising Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s for exactly the same reason.
  • Leon said:

    "Significant majorities now believe the country is headed in the wrong direction."

    "...the crushing setbacks for Democrats in heavily suburban Virginia and New Jersey hinted at a conservative-stoked backlash to the changing mores around race and identity championed by the party, as Republicans relentlessly sought to turn schools into the next front in the country’s culture wars."

    NY Times


    Not looking good for Biden.

    The American Left needs to be annihilated, and driven into the sea
    Is that you, Donald?
    If Leon wasn't so bad at hiding his real identity we'd certainly be looking to trace his IP address to a basement in St Petersburg.
  • So is the UK a banana republic, a one party state or a heady melange of both?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    You'd have been praising Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s for exactly the same reason.
    No, I would not
  • So is the UK a banana republic, a one party state or a heady melange of both?

    The full Hailsham.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    You'd have been praising Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s for exactly the same reason.
    No, I would not
    More a Stalin man?
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,602
    Aurora!

  • Jim Pickard
    @PickardJE
    ·
    43m
    if you’re interested in Tory sleaze you have three more hours before this magazine article goes back behind the
    @ft paywall

    https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1456003972720889858
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited November 2021
    Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952
    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
  • Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
    Looks that way.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited November 2021
    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness" gradually came to be in the 1990's, but also relating to some recent trends on the left that genuinely do raise various issues, particularly when they're in their most extreme form.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
    The best result for America, the West and the World would be the Republicans electing a strongly anti-Woke but SANE democratic candidate who is NOT Trump

    That would rebalance things. Purge Wokeness (and it needs to be purged), let the Right vent its anger safely, then we can all recalibrate

    Another feeble twattish Wokey Democrat winning just because they aren't quite as insane as Trump is a disaster almost as bad as Trump 2.0

    Republicans, shape up. You can save the West - or not
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
    Neither have I seen an appeal process heard by a cherry picked jury of his mates.

    That's populism though, the law and other rules and procedures are seen as obstructive.
  • Is Johnson trying to wreck the standards process and procedures before they start to look into his own affairs?

  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
    Thank you. I have to say my argument with you earlier / the other day wasn't on that point so I am happy to concede I agree with you on that. I also don't know enough about the process to know whether it is fair or not.

    However I should point out (although this is no justification as two wrongs don't make a right) that there are plenty of situations where there is no appeals process. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I am involved in a campaign to rectify one of those that is due its 2nd reading in the HofC shortly. It will be interesting to see if it gets Govt support. There was a meeting with the whips last week. I don't want to go into any more details here but for instance you can not appeal a decision by GAD through the PHSO. The Equitable Law situation required a law to be enacted to allow that to happen. I have been 9 years on the campaign I support, others have been going much longer on other campaigns where they can't get a review of a decision, such that many who should be compensated have died since with MPs doing bugger all. Suddenly it is a Tory MP and all the stops are pulled out and over something he had control over compared to many who don't.
  • I'm starting to wonder if the Paterson thing is typical Boris triangulation. He knows elements of the Right will be getting restive over COP26, so stuffing the namby-pamby parliamentary regulators, who dared to sanction one of the godfathers of Brexit for making a few quid, might be just the ticket. He did the same thing over the National Insurance hike, quickly assuaging Tory ire by showcasing the AUUKUS extravaganza and evoking dreams of Empire II.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420
    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    Did that just come out of a word generator?
  • kjh said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
    Thank you. I have to say my argument with you earlier / the other day wasn't on that point so I am happy to concede I agree with you on that. I also don't know enough about the process to know whether it is fair or not.

    However I should point out (although this is no justification as two wrongs don't make a right) that there are plenty of situations where there is no appeals process. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I am involved in a campaign to rectify one of those that is due its 2nd reading in the HofC shortly. It will be interesting to see if it gets Govt support. There was a meeting with the whips last week. I don't want to go into any more details here but for instance you can not appeal a decision by GAD through the PHSO. The Equitable Law situation required a law to be enacted to allow that to happen. I have been 9 years on the campaign I support, others have been going much longer on other campaigns where they can't get a review of a decision, such that many who should be compensated have died since with MPs doing bugger all. Suddenly it is a Tory MP and all the stops are pulled out and over something he had control over compared to many who don't.
    I'll be completely honest I didn't understand everything you just wrote, but if a judgment is flawed there should always be an opportunity to appeal it - so I hope you win your campaign.

    That's not to say there should be infinite appeals etc or a blank cheque, but there should always be an opportunity if you can demonstrate a genuine flaw in the decision making process to have a chance to have that reviewed.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited November 2021
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
    The best result for America, the West and the World would be the Republicans electing a strongly anti-Woke but SANE democratic candidate who is NOT Trump

    That would rebalance things. Purge Wokeness (and it needs to be purged), let the Right vent its anger safely, then we can all recalibrate

    Another feeble twattish Wokey Democrat winning just because they aren't quite as insane as Trump is a disaster almost as bad as Trump 2.0

    Republicans, shape up. You can save the West - or not
    But the "centrist" part of the Republican Party is hollowing out.

    Bernie Sanders would be a better President than most of the other options, I think.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420
    Good god it doesn't matter what side you are on the fault is always Brexit.
  • Lead item on BBC News at 10.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,952
    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    Don't agree with either of you - they're both just terms of abuse to mean the same thing. Cultural Marxism is favoured by those of a more intellectualist bent, is all.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited November 2021
    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    Scruton was a caricaturist of the '60s - beware of the zeal of the converted, like Peter Hitchens. Both Scruton and Hitchens were bona fide intolerant revolutionaries for a period in the '60s, and understood very little about the huge complexity of academic developments then or since that time, I would say - or about the democratic, "western marxists" like Varoufakis, or anarchists of the time who hated the Trotskyism Hitchens, even Dacre and other born-again conservatives used to support as students.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,697
    edited November 2021
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
    The best result for America, the West and the World would be the Republicans electing a strongly anti-Woke but SANE democratic candidate who is NOT Trump

    That would rebalance things. Purge Wokeness (and it needs to be purged), let the Right vent its anger safely, then we can all recalibrate

    Another feeble twattish Wokey Democrat winning just because they aren't quite as insane as Trump is a disaster almost as bad as Trump 2.0

    Republicans, shape up. You can save the West - or not
    Its not going to work out like that. From now on democracy is a choice between different forms of catastrophe. We should consider ourselves very lucky to have the conservative party; the Patterson scandal and others are nothing compared to Trumps shenanigans.
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673
    Non-Trump Republicans are just as dangerous as Trump. They are all backing gerrymandering, voter suppression, replacing independent election supervision with partisan hacks and allowing unlimited corporate money to buy politicians. And their policy agenda is anti-abortion extremism, zealous tax cutting on the very richest and gutting even basic regulations.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098

    Jim Pickard
    @PickardJE
    ·
    43m
    if you’re interested in Tory sleaze you have three more hours before this magazine article goes back behind the
    @ft paywall

    https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1456003972720889858

    Amazing and depressing. And these people have the gall to pretend they are sticking it to the ruling elite.

    How long before the scales fall from the electorate's eyes?
  • Neil Henderson
    @hendopolis
    ·
    9m
    METRO: The sleazy way out #TomorrowsPapersToday
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    The Democrats are hurtling towards calamity. Yay


    "Centrists are already arguing that the results demonstrate a need to chart a more cautious course or face electoral disaster.

    But the left is in no mood to trim its sails. A collective statement from several progressive groups, including Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement, released after midnight branded the McAuliffe campaign as one that was “designed to fail” and had “no rebuttal to Republican race-baiting bullshit.”

    One thing’s for sure: Republicans are as of today on course to take back control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections."

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/579764-five-takeaways-from-a-grim-night-for-democrats

    Trump returning would be a far greater calamity, I think, particularly for democracy. Manchin and Sinema may have just destroyed a once-in-50 year chance for FDR-style social renewal in the United States.
    The best result for America, the West and the World would be the Republicans electing a strongly anti-Woke but SANE democratic candidate who is NOT Trump

    That would rebalance things. Purge Wokeness (and it needs to be purged), let the Right vent its anger safely, then we can all recalibrate

    Another feeble twattish Wokey Democrat winning just because they aren't quite as insane as Trump is a disaster almost as bad as Trump 2.0

    Republicans, shape up. You can save the West - or not
    But the "centrist" part of the Republican Party is hollowing out.

    Bernie Sanders would be a better President than most of the other options, I think.
    Cory Booker and Pete Buttigieg would both be excellent.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    You'd have been praising Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s for exactly the same reason.
    No, I would not
    You're the new Unity Mitford.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    CatMan said:

    (Continuing from my previous OT post)

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2021/11/03/former-england-star-gary-ballance-outed-yorkshire-cricketer/

    "Former England star Garry Ballance has been outed as the Yorkshire cricketer who called Azeem Rafiq a P--- in what an investigation dismissed as “banter”.

    Ballance’s name was made public following attempts to confront him over the findings of a report in which he also confessed to telling other people, “Don’t talk to him, he’s a P---”, asking, “Is that your uncle?”, when they saw bearded Asian men and saying, “Does your dad own those?” in reference to corner shops.

    Leaked extracts from the report commissioned by Yorkshire County Cricket Club also showed how Ballance – who had not been publicly identified until Wednesday – admitted recalling that Rafiq broke down in tears at one point.

    Despite this, Ballance told lawyers investigating the racism scandal to engulf the club that he had no idea he was causing offence and would have stopped had Rafiq asked."

    Not surely 'England star' is the right phrase - everyone was always demanding for him to be dropped.
    “England star” is in the same category as “senior backbencher”
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I will probably vote Tory but don’t fall into either of your categories
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    kjh said:

    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    Did that just come out of a word generator?
    I have NOT been replaced by GPT4

    *weird screen freeze*

    Dildos! I AM EADRIC.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,074
    Aaron taking a dissenting line on topic, on the 10pm news.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866

    Jim Pickard
    @PickardJE
    ·
    43m
    if you’re interested in Tory sleaze you have three more hours before this magazine article goes back behind the
    @ft paywall

    https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1456003972720889858

    Yes, well worth the read as are some of the other FT free articles today including on the politics of safety:

    https://www.ft.com/content/de097d02-3fa9-4041-ade2-d517af30818c
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098
    Charles said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    It might narrow the Tory lead back to hung parliament territory, I doubt it would put Labour ahead

    I will probably vote Tory but don’t fall into either of your categories
    You don't believe in free enterprise and capitalism?
  • Having seen how the Tories managed to ooze sleaze after too long in power in 80s/90s, it's great to see that past performance can actually be a guide to the future when they get too bloated from having power for too long.....
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,098
    Charles said:

    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go to the direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    Fair enough but then you are a LD capitalist not a full red blooded Tory capitalist, the latter are unlikely to leave the Tories and if they do would be more likely to go ReformUK than Labour or LD
    Bullshit. Corruption is corruption.

    As I was told when starting my career: your reputation is valuable, but you can only sell it once.

    Don’t tarnish the reputation of the conservatives with your ridiculous claims
    Well said. Though to be honest the HoC Conservatives seem to be doing a pretty good job of trashing their own reputation without @HYUFD's help.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,420

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
    Thank you. I have to say my argument with you earlier / the other day wasn't on that point so I am happy to concede I agree with you on that. I also don't know enough about the process to know whether it is fair or not.

    However I should point out (although this is no justification as two wrongs don't make a right) that there are plenty of situations where there is no appeals process. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I am involved in a campaign to rectify one of those that is due its 2nd reading in the HofC shortly. It will be interesting to see if it gets Govt support. There was a meeting with the whips last week. I don't want to go into any more details here but for instance you can not appeal a decision by GAD through the PHSO. The Equitable Law situation required a law to be enacted to allow that to happen. I have been 9 years on the campaign I support, others have been going much longer on other campaigns where they can't get a review of a decision, such that many who should be compensated have died since with MPs doing bugger all. Suddenly it is a Tory MP and all the stops are pulled out and over something he had control over compared to many who don't.
    I'll be completely honest I didn't understand everything you just wrote, but if a judgment is flawed there should always be an opportunity to appeal it - so I hope you win your campaign.

    That's not to say there should be infinite appeals etc or a blank cheque, but there should always be an opportunity if you can demonstrate a genuine flaw in the decision making process to have a chance to have that reviewed.
    Thank you. Not hopeful to be honest even though we have cross party support, the majority of which are Tories including ex cabinet ministers. I get involved in too many of these campaigns but I hate to see these injustices.
  • Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    OnlyLivingBoy said:
    » show previous quotes
    There's a nasty brutal element to the Johnson regime. Absolute loyalty or you swim with the fishes. Eddie Mair had it right when he called Johnson a nasty piece of work.'


    I suspect you are right. And that absolutely makes me want to vote for Boris

    Post Covid, post Brexit, life is going to hard for Britain, for quite a while. I want some mean nasty fucker with ambition and guile in charge of the country, I don't want the bumbling well-meaning Sir Kir Royale

    Yes Boris is cunning and cruel. Perfect. I reckon it was this side that surprised Macron, and entirely blind-sided him, with AUKUS. Hence Macron's enormous pique

    Presumably this all ties in with your recent Putin worship.
    Worship?!

    I have said he is a ferocious autocrat, and deeply reprehensible. Shame on him!

    He is also an astute political observer, and operator, hence his remarkable career. Worth listening to, even as he poisons people
    Apologies - I thought you were siding with him against the 'Bolshevism' that he says is corrupting the West.
    Oh yes I am, absolutely. He's right about Woke and he's right about Bolshevism, and he's right about the analogy between them

    At the same time he is a sort-of tyrant who kills his enemies. But then, the US president often kills his enemies with drones, Obama did it, Trump did it. Trump, unlike Putin, tried to enact a violent coup to hold on to power, Putin merely changed the Constitution with a "plebiscite" so as to do the same, with fewer buffalo horns

    It is increasingly hard to mark out the West as superior, in multiple ways, and Wokeness is yet another massive count against us

    You'd have been praising Hitler and Mussolini in the 30s for exactly the same reason.
    No, I would not
    You're the new Unity Mitford.
    I can see that.

    'Late one night in pre-war Munich, a young English woman, dressed all in black and accompanied by six SS officers in full uniform, climbed the dark stairs to her apartment.
    Once inside she lit two large church candles either side of her bed, their glow revealing enormous swastika banners at its head and silver framed portraits of Adolf Hitler on side tables.
    After sliding off her boots and gauntlet-style gloves, she stepped out of her long black skirt and blindfolded herself with a Nazi armband before lying down, spread-eagled, on the bed.
    One man bound her hands and feet to its four corners while another, in what was obviously a familiar ritual, wound up the gramophone and dropped the needle on to a record of Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi anthem.
    This was the cue for the other officers to remove their boots, belts and uniforms. Then, as the pounding marching song broke the silence, they took it in turns to enjoy the entirely willing object of their desire.'
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 43,866
    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    No, "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory favoured by the far Right, a sort of modern Protocols of Zion.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 45,699
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Endillion said:

    Leon said:

    For HYUFD

    Everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe has either a personal memory, or the folk memory, of communism, and all its horrors. They can see how Wokeness mirrors its lunacies.

    As Putin says in his famous speech

    "We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress. Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this. Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, “reverse discrimination” against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal.


    "The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

    "This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66975

    He goes on for another 1000 pretty forensic words....

    It is often argued that "wokeism" is cultural Marxism; an argument that is furiously opposed by proponents of said movement. If there's anyone on the planet who knows a thing or two about Marxism, though...
    "Cultural Marxism" is broadbrush nonsense that tends to be favoured as a conspiracy theory by the far right, and which laymen wrongly imagine to have been a cultural equivalent of political egalitarianism. "Wokeism" is something slightly different, I would say ; now already both a catch-all conservative term of abuse for anything progressive, as "political correctness", but also relating to some trends on the left that do raise various issues, in their most extreme forms.
    No. Cultural Marxism is a precise and meaningful term, descriptive of the intellectual effluent produced by the Frankfurt School, passim

    Read more Scruton
    No, "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory favoured by the far Right, a sort of modern Protocols of Zion.
    No it isn't, you daft twat. Stick to doctoring
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,244
    edited November 2021
    darkage said:



    Its not going to work out like that. From now on democracy is a choice between different forms of catastrophe. We should consider ourselves very lucky to have the conservative party; the Patterson scandal and others are nothing compared to Trumps shenanigans.

    Yes, well, all things are relative. I remember teaching a Chinese seminar group and frankly describing the expenses scandal - they fell about laughing at the idea that MPs were doing things like buying large TVs, carpets and duck houses and this was supposed to be a scandal. One said that he thought it was rather sweet by comparison to the abuses that sometimes came to light "in some countries".

    Nonetheless, the existence of worse things does not mean it's not a slippery slope.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    So is the UK a banana republic, a one party state or a heady melange of both?

    The full Hailsham.
    I’ve not come across that phrase before. What does it mean?
  • How does that Tweet have anything to do with what happened today?
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    I doubt it.

    If you are still voting Tory it is a) because you are a Leaver and believe in Boris and Brexit and this is unlikely to shift you to Starmer Labour or LD or b) because you believe in free enterprise and capitalism in which case a bit of paid for lobbying for a private company is hardly the end of the world even if found not to technically be fully within parliamentary rules.

    HYUFD I'm a bit surprised by you re b) as I think of you as quite a moral person. I am a believer in free enterprise and capitalism and ran my own company and I represented the interest of a quite a few significant organisations. But in the agreement I drew up to cover our relationship I ensured there could be no conflict of interest like this. None of my customers actually gave a damn provided I did the job, but I wanted to ensure I could never be accused of such rightly or wrongly and I would never have done so even innocently. I went to great lengths to ensure this eg any payment from someone for say a stand at a meeting I organised would either go direct to the venue and not via me, or if to me I would use it clearly for the benefit of my customers eg reduced fees.

    You can be both honest and a capitalist.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you.

    If Paterson is guilty then he should be punished. My only objection is that there should be a fair method to determine that he is, and I have never seen a system before where one person can act as judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal at all.
    Thank you. I have to say my argument with you earlier / the other day wasn't on that point so I am happy to concede I agree with you on that. I also don't know enough about the process to know whether it is fair or not.

    However I should point out (although this is no justification as two wrongs don't make a right) that there are plenty of situations where there is no appeals process. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, I am involved in a campaign to rectify one of those that is due its 2nd reading in the HofC shortly. It will be interesting to see if it gets Govt support. There was a meeting with the whips last week. I don't want to go into any more details here but for instance you can not appeal a decision by GAD through the PHSO. The Equitable Law situation required a law to be enacted to allow that to happen. I have been 9 years on the campaign I support, others have been going much longer on other campaigns where they can't get a review of a decision, such that many who should be compensated have died since with MPs doing bugger all. Suddenly it is a Tory MP and all the stops are pulled out and over something he had control over compared to many who don't.
    I'll be completely honest I didn't understand everything you just wrote, but if a judgment is flawed there should always be an opportunity to appeal it - so I hope you win your campaign.

    That's not to say there should be infinite appeals etc or a blank cheque, but there should always be an opportunity if you can demonstrate a genuine flaw in the decision making process to have a chance to have that reviewed.
    Thank you. Not hopeful to be honest even though we have cross party support, the majority of which are Tories including ex cabinet ministers. I get involved in too many of these campaigns but I hate to see these injustices.
    That's interesting. Out of curiosity if you're able to say is there much crossover between the support you're getting for this, and the names on the amendment today? If there is then they're being consistent and that would be good to see.
This discussion has been closed.