A former SPAD has messaged me to remind me that, apropos of absolutely nothing, a speeding ticket is normally dealt with a fine (and points), so how'd that turn out for Chris Huhne?
BorisJohnsonIsAPoundShopNixon
Pound shop Nixon? I mentioned yesterday that the writing might be on the wall. Agnew's resignation...
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
A former SPAD has messaged me to remind me that, apropos of absolutely nothing, a speeding ticket is normally dealt with a fine (and points), so how'd that turn out for Chris Huhne?
BorisJohnsonIsAPoundShopNixon
Pound shop Nixon? I mentioned yesterday that the writing might be on the wall. Agnew's resignation...
Has anyone heard the Sumption interview at lunchtime? He raised some interesting legal arguments. Now I think legal arguments are - to a very great extent - missing the point about why this is a political problem for the Tories. The sense of solidarity, of all being in this together, has been trashed.
But the police can only investigate a breach of the law. And if you look at the Regulations - not the guidance - which were in place at the time, the offence was being away from your home without a "reasonable excuse".
This was not defined though a number of examples are given. Being at work - if this could not reasonably be done at home - would be a reasonable excuse.
So let's take all those people at No 10 on the day of Boris's birthday. If they had to be at work they were not committing any offence by being away from home because they had a reasonable excuse. There was no separate offence of eating cakes, birthday or otherwise. If someone brought a cake to celebrate a birthday this does not automatically make their presence at work unreasonable.
Ah but what about the numbers of people there you ask? Well Regulation 7 did indeed impose restrictions on gatherings but in "public places".
Offices at No 10 are not public places are they? So it is not clear to me that there has been a breach of this regulation in relation to the birthday party. It may of course depend on precisely where the gathering was etc.
I only point this out because the police will not simply have to collect the facts but also understand the relevant legal restrictions and ensure that they apply the law to the facts. Not guidance. Not what people thought it all meant. And one thing we do know is that when they tried prosecuting people before under these Regulations they were found, once the CPS looked into it, to have often got it wrong.
All of this is is utterly irrelevant to the political impact, which is what should be concerning Tory MPs. That political impact is two-fold:-
1. The general 2-fingers up approach to the rest of us. 2. The lies in Parliament about it all.
But the idea that the police can cheerfully hand out Fixed Penalty Notices to everyone who was singing Happy Birthday to the PM while they were in the office because "they broke the law" may not survive legal scrutiny by those acting for those in the police's sights.
Lots of people are saying I couldn't have a birthday party etc. But that was because you could not go to someone's home for any sort of celebration. But if you had a reasonable excuse for being somewhere I struggle to see what law was in place which made it a crime to share a cake with the people also at that place of work.
No doubt other lawyers on here will put me right if I've got this wrong.
Interesting as all of this is to those of us without a life, the reality is that Tory MPs need to stop outsourcing their consciences to Sue Gray or the Met and grow a spine.
You're clearly right that it's not a slam-dunk. But there comes a point when celebratory activities - eating cake, singing, drinking wine and going to buy more, playing loud music, playing games on a swing - make it difficult to maintain that those involved are still at work at all. The fact that it's a workplace is not sufficient - if I go into work with others and we have a frenzied orgy on our desks, it's still a place of work but we're clearly not working (in the usual sense of the term...).
Cyclefree is obviously the lawyer here, but as I understood it beyond the issue of home or workplace food and drink for "a social rather than work reason" was expressly prohibited. As was singing together. That would make these concrete breaches, which other people were fined for, if I have the law right.
Well, here are the relevant regulations from spring 2020.
I cannot find anywhere in there anything which says that "food and drink for a social rather than work reason" was expressly prohibited.
Not trying to be snarky or difficult. Just saying that the law - as opposed to the guidance or the spirit of the restrictions - was not, as fas I can tell, what was and still is generally assumed.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
Aside from everything else, if those at the centre of government had made even the slightest effort to confirm with the rules that they were eager to enforce upon the rest of us, don’t we think they might have had a better understanding of what they were doing?
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Aside from everything else, if those at the centre of government had made even the slightest effort to confirm with the rules that they were eager to enforce upon the rest of us, don’t we think they might have had a better understanding of what they were doing?
I’m not sure why it’s so hard for very clever people to understand that if you pass a law banning people from doing quite trivial things, then if you do those trivial things yourself it isn’t trivial, it’s genuinely scandalous. https://twitter.com/thhamilton/status/1486037897275125762
Guys - I know that politically this is disastrous for the PM. Rightly so. He has taken us for fools and lied.
Legally, the position may not be the same. This does not matter politically because the criticism to be made of him is a political one.
But it is important to note that when it comes to charging people (including the PM) with criminal offences, the law - ie what the Regulations actually said at the relevant times - matters a great deal.
That's my point. So do not be surprised to find that charges may not follow quite as easily as some are supposing. I certainly wouldn't be, especially given what happened to previous prosecutions when the CPS looked at them.
If Tory MPs had any gumption, all this would be irrelevant because they would have got rid of him long before.
A former SPAD has messaged me to remind me that, apropos of absolutely nothing, a speeding ticket is normally dealt with a fine (and points), so how'd that turn out for Chris Huhne?
BorisJohnsonIsAPoundShopNixon
Pound shop Nixon? I mentioned yesterday that the writing might be on the wall. Agnew's resignation...
Poorly timed if the aim was to sink Sunak...
I was thinking Spiro Agnew whose resignation told us the game was up for Nixon...
Very good interview with Lord Sumption that I've just got round to hearing.
Makes perfect sense. Law is obscure so good luck with proving an actual offence under the ordinance, and of all the reasons to get rid of Boris having a birthday party is one of the more trivial.
Good to see one Eton and Oxford educated Tory making a dispassionate and objective case in defence of another... The Establishment protecting its own as per bloody usual.
We are playing Boris's game if the conversation devolves into whether he did or did not break any laws. This is about arrogance and hypocrisy and always had been. Everyone was exhorted to obey the letter and spirit of the law to protect the NHS and save lives.
THIS. 100x This.
He is the only person in Britain who thinks he did not break the rules.
Not quite. I believe there's a gentleman in Epping......
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
The former would swiftly close as it would no longer attract enough parents to pay the fees, as any business in the private sector would close if it could not attract enough customers.
An inadequate grammar is extremely rare but would also see a loss of pupils if it fell below the results of an average comprehensive
Very good interview with Lord Sumption that I've just got round to hearing.
Makes perfect sense. Law is obscure so good luck with proving an actual offence under the ordinance, and of all the reasons to get rid of Boris having a birthday party is one of the more trivial.
Good to see one Eton and Oxford educated Tory making a dispassionate and objective case in defence of another... The Establishment protecting its own as per bloody usual.
We are playing Boris's game if the conversation devolves into whether he did or did not break any laws. This is about arrogance and hypocrisy and always had been. Everyone was exhorted to obey the letter and spirit of the law to protect the NHS and save lives.
THIS. 100x This.
He is the only person in Britain who thinks he did not break the rules.
All this 101x.
It is his attitude and disrespect to Parliament and process central to all of this. Lie outside the chamber if you chose to, but Our Democracy relies on the country’s leaders setting the example of probity and respect within it.
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
All just fussy patterns quarrelling with other fussy patterns
A friend of mine bought a pub a bit ago and took me there, and I said I bet you can't wait to get rid of all this grotty mismatched furniture. Turned out to be an ensemble carefully curated by him personally from the most expensive auction houses in the country.
Oh Z. Go and sit in the dragons old chair in the corner
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Is that so racist? We know full well that the average British Indian pupil gets higher exam results than the average white pupil and more black pupils play football than cricket.
Yes there are exceptions and some Indian pupils want to be cricketers not doctors and some black pupils who prefer football to cricket but those statements are true generally
What if Germany was possessed, and Hitler was the demon?
"We Germans are experts at forgetting. We forgot we were Nazis. Now we have forgotten 40 years of Communism - all gone!" - Bruno Ganz in Liam Neeson's ,,Unbekannt".
All just fussy patterns quarrelling with other fussy patterns
A friend of mine bought a pub a bit ago and took me there, and I said I bet you can't wait to get rid of all this grotty mismatched furniture. Turned out to be an ensemble carefully curated by him personally from the most expensive auction houses in the country.
Oh Z. Go and sit in the dragons old chair in the corner
I can see you know him. ETA that looks rather comfortable
As a non-partisan point, things like 'ambushed by a cake' are a useful reminder why governments in crisis need spokespeople like Grant Shapps. You might not be able to remember a thing he said on his broadcast round this morning, but sometimes that's the point. https://twitter.com/DPMcBride/status/1486067085092524043
Thangam Debbonaire has been reselected without a full selection process, after winning all branches and affiliates that returned a quorate vote before the deadline, I'm told. Bristol West one of the first seats to complete their trigger ballot process.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Is it “racist” to observe that West Indians in the West Indies are turning to basketball, over cricket? No. So why is this any different?
And South Asian parents MASSIVELY prioritise formal education over everything else. It’s probably a good thing, but comes with issues. Is there a South Asian mother in the country who would say Yes try and become a cricketer rather than Yes try and become a doctor?
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
As I already said there are rarely many inadequate private schools as they swiftly close as parents no longer send their children there and stop paying the fees.
If you are poor and cannot afford private school fees and in the catchment area of an inadequate comp or academy however and not religious so you cannot get into a top church school which takes pupils based on church attendance, then you have no choice but to attend it
Tory MPs have in their power the ability to cauterise the wound, but they seem transfixed at the sight of their lifeblood oozing out
I’ve been reading all this “they are spineless” stuff on here all week, and it’s rubbish, it’s lazy and doesn’t deserve to grace the pages of PB.
There’s a group of committed rebels, there’s a group of committed loyalists (you can normally tell them from very rubbish hair styles), and then a great mass of bewildered in the middle, some lean this way, some that, bewildered because 5 months ago there was no crisis, back in May they felt indestructible for a generation, and in all honesty they are waiting to see if it blows over and waiting to see if Boris ratings can recover. That’s the truest of true picture, so cut out “it’s because they are spineless” stuff because it is rubbish.
Someone coming out bath now gotta put pad down shhhhhhh
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Is it race or is it class? Are the white working class well represented?
I was a half-decent wrist spin bowler at 14, but never in a month of Sundays was it ever an option for me. Education came first.
A bit of both, education, education, education was the only thing my parents wanted me to focus on.
It was one of the reasons we didn't have Sky for so long.
There was an interesting thread on twitter talking of the barriers to playing cricket and one of those was the sheer cost for young people to play the game professionally.
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
They will still not vote SF or SDLP as their first preference however.
NI STV also ensures lots of Unionist MLAs get elected even if multiple Unionist parties
All just fussy patterns quarrelling with other fussy patterns
A friend of mine bought a pub a bit ago and took me there, and I said I bet you can't wait to get rid of all this grotty mismatched furniture. Turned out to be an ensemble carefully curated by him personally from the most expensive auction houses in the country.
Oh Z. Go and sit in the dragons old chair in the corner
I can see you know him. ETA that looks rather comfortable
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Very good interview with Lord Sumption that I've just got round to hearing.
Makes perfect sense. Law is obscure so good luck with proving an actual offence under the ordinance, and of all the reasons to get rid of Boris having a birthday party is one of the more trivial.
Good to see one Eton and Oxford educated Tory making a dispassionate and objective case in defence of another... The Establishment protecting its own as per bloody usual.
We are playing Boris's game if the conversation devolves into whether he did or did not break any laws. This is about arrogance and hypocrisy and always had been. Everyone was exhorted to obey the letter and spirit of the law to protect the NHS and save lives.
THIS. 100x This.
He is the only person in Britain who thinks he did not break the rules.
All this 101x.
It is his attitude and disrespect to Parliament and process central to all of this. Lie outside the chamber if you chose to, but Our Democracy relies on the country’s leaders setting the example of probity and respect within it.
The racism furore in county cricket has reignited after the chairman of Middlesex expressed "outdated" stereotypes on why cricket is failing to nurture black and Asian talent.
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
Is that so racist? We know full well that the average British Indian pupil gets higher exam results than the average white pupil and more black pupils play football than cricket.
Yes there are exceptions and some Indian pupils want to be cricketers not doctors and some black pupils who prefer football to cricket but those statements are true generally
You only mention Indian. Those of Indian origin are only a part of the group being talked about. By contrast, those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin on average achieve less well in the education system.
In the case of Yorkshire, for example, the mystery is why so few of those of Pakistani origin have made the grade in cricket, when there are dozens of Pakistani-based leagues in Bradford, Leeds and the rest of West Yorkshire.
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
Famously, he was once pro having cake and eating it, but now, sadly, he’s been ambushed by one.
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
Ambushed by a cake should be his epitaph
Ambushed by a custard pie would have been funnier.
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
As I already said there are rarely many inadequate private schools as they swiftly close as parents no longer send their children there and stop paying the fees.
If you are poor and cannot afford private school fees and in the catchment area of an inadequate comp or academy however and not religious so you cannot get into a top church school which takes pupils based on church attendance, then you have no choice but to attend it
I think you'll find that it's not just the "poor" who can't afford private school fees.
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
Famously, he was once pro having cake and eating it, but now, sadly, he’s been ambushed by one.
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
They still share the building with ITV don't they? Maybe the channel to scoop all others know something.
Seriously, I have to hand it to ITV News, particularly but not exclusively Paul Brand. They've done some brilliant investigative journalism and Tom Bradby has reminded me of some of the great news anchors of yesteryear who weren't afraid to give an opinion when it was needed.
Has anyone heard the Sumption interview at lunchtime? He raised some interesting legal arguments. Now I think legal arguments are - to a very great extent - missing the point about why this is a political problem for the Tories. The sense of solidarity, of all being in this together, has been trashed.
But the police can only investigate a breach of the law. And if you look at the Regulations - not the guidance - which were in place at the time, the offence was being away from your home without a "reasonable excuse".
This was not defined though a number of examples are given. Being at work - if this could not reasonably be done at home - would be a reasonable excuse.
So let's take all those people at No 10 on the day of Boris's birthday. If they had to be at work they were not committing any offence by being away from home because they had a reasonable excuse. There was no separate offence of eating cakes, birthday or otherwise. If someone brought a cake to celebrate a birthday this does not automatically make their presence at work unreasonable.
Ah but what about the numbers of people there you ask? Well Regulation 7 did indeed impose restrictions on gatherings but in "public places".
Offices at No 10 are not public places are they? So it is not clear to me that there has been a breach of this regulation in relation to the birthday party. It may of course depend on precisely where the gathering was etc.
I only point this out because the police will not simply have to collect the facts but also understand the relevant legal restrictions and ensure that they apply the law to the facts. Not guidance. Not what people thought it all meant. And one thing we do know is that when they tried prosecuting people before under these Regulations they were found, once the CPS looked into it, to have often got it wrong.
All of this is is utterly irrelevant to the political impact, which is what should be concerning Tory MPs. That political impact is two-fold:-
1. The general 2-fingers up approach to the rest of us. 2. The lies in Parliament about it all.
But the idea that the police can cheerfully hand out Fixed Penalty Notices to everyone who was singing Happy Birthday to the PM while they were in the office because "they broke the law" may not survive legal scrutiny by those acting for those in the police's sights.
Lots of people are saying I couldn't have a birthday party etc. But that was because you could not go to someone's home for any sort of celebration. But if you had a reasonable excuse for being somewhere I struggle to see what law was in place which made it a crime to share a cake with the people also at that place of work.
No doubt other lawyers on here will put me right if I've got this wrong.
Interesting as all of this is to those of us without a life, the reality is that Tory MPs need to stop outsourcing their consciences to Sue Gray or the Met and grow a spine.
Was not Carrie Johnson away from home without a reasonable excuse?
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
Famously, he was once pro having cake and eating it, but now, sadly, he’s been ambushed by one.
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
Everyone in the country knows the service isn't good enough. The question is, who will put the most effort into fixing it, someone who has always relied on it or someone who has chosen not to use it?
Well, for a start, effort isn't everything; a fool who has an obsession with purity but realises the service is poor might well put in a lot of effort, but a fat lot of good that effort will do if it's uninformed or blinded by ideology. What you want is someone with understanding of how huge organisations work, how to improve them, and how to get value for money from them, against the hugely difficult problems of political interference, the institutional inertia, the changing technology, and the reluctance to learn from best practice elsewhere.
Whether a candidate uses private healthcare is just about the most irrelevant criterion you could come up with, especially since nearly all qualified candidates will have done.
It might not the most relevant factor but neither is it anywhere near the least. Somebody who believes in public healthcare to the extent they don't go private despite being able to afford it is likely to be a better choice to run it than somebody with similar profile and abilities who lacks that strength of belief. Ditto with education. Double ditto with education in fact.
You clearly know very little about hiring if you think there are ever two equal profiles. People who support Labour need to grow up on the public sector/ private divide. It was clearly one of the things Blair never succeeded in changing. The approach you have borders on the fanatical. You are public sector puritans, where the public sector, and the NHS in particular is some repository of all virtue, and anyone that doesn't align is a heretic or infidel. Sorry to break it to you but there really are just as many selfish nasty self serving people in the public sector as there are in private. They just manifest their behaviours in slightly different ways. As for education, I can tell you as someone that went to a comp (a pretty bad one) and sent my kids privately, the public sector could learn a lot from the private, double ditto, if you like, but the puritans just don't want to hear it.
Similar not equal. And it's hardly fanatical to consider a strong & genuine belief in the thing they are looking to run to be one of the key attributes a candidate ought to have.
So when did he say he didn't? I am quite happy to "believe" in the NHS IF it provides a good service, but if I have to wait for 6 months to see a consultant, because the system allows consultants to moonlight (yep it was Labour that allowed such a ludicrous system) then I chose a different system does that make me a heretic in your eyes? The fundamental is choice. I think people should be allowed it and you don't. You think you should be allowed to go on holidays to the Maldives, or whatever else your middle class salary allows you to do, but I shouldn't be allowed to spend my surplus cash on providing what is without any shadow of doubt in my mind a better education for my kids than I had? That is the fundamental philosophical problem with Labour supporters. They are judgmental and bossy.
I look around me and I see two fundamental facts. First, our public services are falling apart, starved of cash, failing. Second, many, maybe most, of the powerful and influential people involved in running the country don't actually use these services themselves. It strikes me as rather plausible that these two facts are related. It's got nothing to do with being judgemental. I would just like to live in a country with well funded, functioning public services. FWIW I would do whatever I needed to do in the interests of my family as anyone else would, and I don't judge those who make different choices to me.
Believing in the principle of the NHS, but going private because the current condition of the NHS is not good isn't really a contradiction so much as pragmatism.
Quite. I don't criticise those who come to that conclusion. As individuals we all have to do what we can for ourselves and our families. But as a society, I believe that when the elite don't use the same services as everyone else, those services are more likely to be starved of resources. The basis of that belief is threefold: international comparisons (public services in Sweden vs the US for instance, or the example of Jim Crow era "separate but equal" education in the Southern US); my own experience (wealthy people I know through work who don't even know that public services are starved of cash, let alone care or vote to improve things); and simple common sense. To reiterate, this is not a judgement on individual choices under current circumstances, but a statement on how I would like those circumstances to change, and an explanation of why I think they won't.
Oh, I agree. One reason my parents sent me to comprehensive schools was their view that if ambitious parents won't push for schools to be better, then no one else would. My folks are hardly Marxists either, my mum has been a member of the Conservative Party for about 65 years.
There are comprehensive schools and comprehensive schools. A church comprehensive school or academy in a leafy suburban catchment area will get far better results on average than a comprehensive school or academy in a poor part of an inner city or a seaside town.
Middle class parents will still choose an outstanding comprehensive over an inadequate comprehensive, just as they would choose an Outstanding private school or grammar school over an inadequate comprehensive
What about an inadequate private school or grammar school?
According to HY they are still head and shoulders better than a well run Comp.
The Crypt School in Gloucester was infamously bad when I was growing up, with results barely above those of Newent, St Peter’s and Chosen Hill, well below those of Balcarras.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
I went on a geography A level field trip to Orielton in Pembrokeshire, on the course were some students from the Crypt. They seemed more interested in bunking off to the pub, which was very much against the rules.
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
At some point, I think it was the 2016 Conservative leadership vote, it did seem like the purpose of British politics was to make life miserable for history teachers of the future. I mean, imagine trying to explain that to teenagers as if it made any sense whatsoever. If Johnson falls over a cake, that might just be the lucky break they need. Cakes are simple and memorable.
And if it encourages BoJo to go, can we try pointing out that the only thing that makes King Alfred memorable is a story about cakes. So now he's got his place in history, can he please go away?
OT. Anyone watch Ch4 News? It ended on a cliff-hanger. 'There could be something happening as early as tonight and someone could be pushing the panic button inside No 10 even NOW'. All a bit dramatic but I just saw the last two minutes.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
They still share the building with ITV don't they? Maybe the channel to scoop all others know something.
Seriously, I have to hand it to ITV News, particularly but not exclusively Paul Brand. They've done some brilliant investigative journalism and Tom Bradby has reminded me of some of the great news anchors of yesteryear who weren't afraid to give an opinion when it was needed.
I've long suspected that Cummings is giving his stuff to ITV because he knows that if he gave it to the BBC then Boris and his pals would distract from the issue by attacking the biased BBC and the licence fee.
Expect to see the following very quickly after the Sue Gray report is published [a quick thread…]
1/ Boris Johnson addressing MPs. He has vowed to speak to Parliament about the findings. Speaking as soon as it drops or soon after allows him to start rolling out the ‘change coming’ agenda even as MPs are digesting the findings. Which helps him politically.
2/ Sackings. There’s near universal acceptance among Tory MPs, advisers, people who have Boris’s ear that his inner circle will be shaken up. Again, gives him political cover. Loads of names speculated. Unclear how big. But departures (whether ‘sackings’ or ‘resignations’) likely
3/ Vows to overhaul the No 10 booze culture. Already floated by Oliver Dowden on a past media round. A ‘something went wrong and we’ll change it’ message. Possibly with hard new rules / promises (a booze ban one option reported in papers). Gives substance to the mea culpa.
4/ More no confidence letters. Some of the ‘we’re waiting for Sue Gray’ lines from Tory MPs may be buying time but others sound like they mean it. Some think it’s v possible - maybe probable - the 54 letters mark is hit in few days after Gray report. Which = up down vote on PM.
5/ A big row about how much of what Gray knows is made public. She’ll hand over her “findings”. But what about witness statements / photos / whatsapp messages? These aren’t expected but who knows. Likewise a row likely about how many attendees are named. Watch this space. [end]
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
Remember that UUP chap Ladyt Davidson said would save the Union? Having a bit of a sticky time. (Interesting issue of whether he is also showing a failure of leadership. But certainly nobody at the UUP thought to do a bit of searching, it seems.)
'THE Ulster Unionist Party leader has asked colleagues whether he should resign amid a controversy over historical tweets.
Doug Beattie, who Ruth Davidson has said is "quite possibly" the man who'll save the Union, has faced accusations of misogyny and racism over the content of tweets posted before he entered political life.
The Upper Bann MLA conceded that the posts, the majority of which were written around a decade ago, were “horrendous and horrific”.
He told BBC Radio Ulster: “I will speak to my MLA group today and I will speak to my party officers through my chairman, Danny Kennedy, and if either group feels I should step down, then I will.
“Likewise, if they think I should refer myself to the party executive or the wider council on a vote of no confidence then I shall do that as well, and the party will decide whether or not they can follow my leadership.”'
As far as I can see the worst thing Doug Beattie did was insult Edwin Poot's wife.
As his main target voters are middle class soft Unionist Alliance voters he may even end up with a poll bounce from that! (Even if he shouldn't have done it)
"A series of derogatory messages came to light referring to women, Muslims, members of the Travelling community and people with mental health issues."
Care to do a word by word analysis of your comparison with that rather nasty tweet about Mrs Poots? And why should middle class and relatively centrist voters be at all impressed by the Mrs Poots joke? Which was extremely personal - look at it.
As Poots is a hardline DUPer.
Beattie at the end of the day is only targeting a small pool of voters ie relatively wealthy, middle class soft Unionists who might swing between UUP and Alliance.
Nationalists and leftwingers in NI will vote SF or SDLP, hardline Unionists will vote DUP or TUV so he will never win either of those groups whatever he tweets
Their children, as they become voting adults, on the other hand......
And I have a little knowledge of which I speak.
Will still not vote SF or SDLP if Protestants
Most elections in NI use STV and Protestants do sometimes vote for Nationalist parties (and vice versa) with their lower preferences. The sort of person who might vote UUP often put the SDLP perhaps 3rd or 4th in preference to SF or even in preference to the unionist extremists (e.g. TUV). A lot of UUP/SDLP/Alliance transfers have been seen in recent elections.
They will still not vote SF or SDLP as their first preference however.
NI STV also ensures lots of Unionist MLAs get elected even if multiple Unionist parties
Maybe not, but people get elected based on those second, third, fourth… preferences.
Has anyone heard the Sumption interview at lunchtime? He raised some interesting legal arguments. Now I think legal arguments are - to a very great extent - missing the point about why this is a political problem for the Tories. The sense of solidarity, of all being in this together, has been trashed.
But the police can only investigate a breach of the law. And if you look at the Regulations - not the guidance - which were in place at the time, the offence was being away from your home without a "reasonable excuse".
This was not defined though a number of examples are given. Being at work - if this could not reasonably be done at home - would be a reasonable excuse.
So let's take all those people at No 10 on the day of Boris's birthday. If they had to be at work they were not committing any offence by being away from home because they had a reasonable excuse. There was no separate offence of eating cakes, birthday or otherwise. If someone brought a cake to celebrate a birthday this does not automatically make their presence at work unreasonable.
Ah but what about the numbers of people there you ask? Well Regulation 7 did indeed impose restrictions on gatherings but in "public places".
Offices at No 10 are not public places are they? So it is not clear to me that there has been a breach of this regulation in relation to the birthday party. It may of course depend on precisely where the gathering was etc.
I only point this out because the police will not simply have to collect the facts but also understand the relevant legal restrictions and ensure that they apply the law to the facts. Not guidance. Not what people thought it all meant. And one thing we do know is that when they tried prosecuting people before under these Regulations they were found, once the CPS looked into it, to have often got it wrong.
All of this is is utterly irrelevant to the political impact, which is what should be concerning Tory MPs. That political impact is two-fold:-
1. The general 2-fingers up approach to the rest of us. 2. The lies in Parliament about it all.
But the idea that the police can cheerfully hand out Fixed Penalty Notices to everyone who was singing Happy Birthday to the PM while they were in the office because "they broke the law" may not survive legal scrutiny by those acting for those in the police's sights.
Lots of people are saying I couldn't have a birthday party etc. But that was because you could not go to someone's home for any sort of celebration. But if you had a reasonable excuse for being somewhere I struggle to see what law was in place which made it a crime to share a cake with the people also at that place of work.
No doubt other lawyers on here will put me right if I've got this wrong.
Interesting as all of this is to those of us without a life, the reality is that Tory MPs need to stop outsourcing their consciences to Sue Gray or the Met and grow a spine.
Was not Carrie Johnson away from home without a reasonable excuse?
I'd have thought living with Boris would give Carrie a reasonable excuse to be away from home constantly.
I've long suspected that Cummings is giving his stuff to ITV because he knows that if he gave it to the BBC then Boris and his pals would distract from the issue by attacking the biased BBC and the licence fee.
NEW: Another Cabinet row erupted today as two senior ministers clashed over the future of the BBC for the second week running...
Nadine Dorries and Therese Coffey crossed swords again over funding of Beeb - with @thejonnyreilly
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
Your mother sucks cocks in hell.
I was once talking on the phone to a friend who had just lost his mother. I was flailing around, wondering what to say, and for some God-awful reason that resonant line from the Exorcist sprang to mind and I said it, in some weird attempt to make light of the situation. A nanosecond later I thought OMFG what have I just said, he will now hate me forever, justifiably, but what I had said was so outrageous he didn’t notice. Like the famous video of the gorilla on the basketball court, perhaps
There’s an excellent passage in an otherwise middling David Baddiel novel where he talks about this. The strange desire to say the Worst thing possible, in awkward situations. He’s right. It exists
I wonder if it is akin to the stray furtive desire we all have, on occasion: to jump under a Tube Train, as it trundles in to the station
NEW: Have heard there has been a meeting of 30 Boris Johnson loyalist MPs tonight discussing what can be done to try to shore up support. Sounds like the "shadow whipping operation" MPs - have a Whatsapp group with over 100 Tories on it... 1/
They are getting those loyal MPs to try to persuade colleagues to get Johnson through this - arguing that he needs to be able to focus on the other issues on table - Ukraine/cost of living. 2/
But told even by those most loyal to the PM that they believe it will be a massive, uphill challenge to win back support of country and party - including in parliament - if (and it's obviously a big if) he gets through this 3/
In what sort of reminds me of the way that anger at Theresa May in 2017 immediately turned to key advisers, they are talking about "fundamental reform" of how Downing st operates (have heard much more scathing language on this pnt from Tory MPs who oppose Johnson) 4/
One MP said they felt it would need less a night of the long knives, and more a week of the machete. Though others I speak to really dislike that language - and really feel for officials - arguing that tone is always set from the top 5/
I've long suspected that Cummings is giving his stuff to ITV because he knows that if he gave it to the BBC then Boris and his pals would distract from the issue by attacking the biased BBC and the licence fee.
NEW: Another Cabinet row erupted today as two senior ministers clashed over the future of the BBC for the second week running...
Nadine Dorries and Therese Coffey crossed swords again over funding of Beeb - with @thejonnyreilly
What if Germany was possessed, and Hitler was the demon?
"We Germans are experts at forgetting. We forgot we were Nazis. Now we have forgotten 40 years of Communism - all gone!" - Bruno Ganz in Liam Neeson's ,,Unbekannt".
'The Austrian's are brilliant people. They made the world believe Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian' Billie Wilder
Expect to see the following very quickly after the Sue Gray report is published [a quick thread…]
1/ Boris Johnson addressing MPs. He has vowed to speak to Parliament about the findings. Speaking as soon as it drops or soon after allows him to start rolling out the ‘change coming’ agenda even as MPs are digesting the findings. Which helps him politically.
2/ Sackings. There’s near universal acceptance among Tory MPs, advisers, people who have Boris’s ear that his inner circle will be shaken up. Again, gives him political cover. Loads of names speculated. Unclear how big. But departures (whether ‘sackings’ or ‘resignations’) likely
3/ Vows to overhaul the No 10 booze culture. Already floated by Oliver Dowden on a past media round. A ‘something went wrong and we’ll change it’ message. Possibly with hard new rules / promises (a booze ban one option reported in papers). Gives substance to the mea culpa.
4/ More no confidence letters. Some of the ‘we’re waiting for Sue Gray’ lines from Tory MPs may be buying time but others sound like they mean it. Some think it’s v possible - maybe probable - the 54 letters mark is hit in few days after Gray report. Which = up down vote on PM.
5/ A big row about how much of what Gray knows is made public. She’ll hand over her “findings”. But what about witness statements / photos / whatsapp messages? These aren’t expected but who knows. Likewise a row likely about how many attendees are named. Watch this space. [end]
There is something deeply British, and in some ways delightful, that a PM whose incompetence caused thousands of avoidable deaths, and whose implementation of Brexit is so damaging to the economy, and whose principal claim to fame internationally is wanting to renege on a treaty he not only signed, but praised extravagantly, just months before, and who prioritised dogs that weren't in danger over men and women who had put their trust in Britain and who were, and whose flagship 'policy' of levelling up is entirely vacuous, is in deep do-dah over some relatively minor breaches of his own regulations and a cake.
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
At some point, I think it was the 2016 Conservative leadership vote, it did seem like the purpose of British politics was to make life miserable for history teachers of the future. I mean, imagine trying to explain that to teenagers as if it made any sense whatsoever. If Johnson falls over a cake, that might just be the lucky break they need. Cakes are simple and memorable.
And if it encourages BoJo to go, can we try pointing out that the only thing that makes King Alfred memorable is a story about cakes. So now he's got his place in history, can he please go away?
The story about the cakes was an allegory. The rout at Chippenham was so sudden and comprehensive that he was clearly lost the support of his people. The cake story was explaining - in a non-obvious way - that he had ignored his duty as a king to look after Wessex and, as a result, the people had turned on him in anger.
(And the book of poetry as a kid, the candle and the English translations of philosophical works are well known as well. Not to mention his piles.)
This is the modern psychiatric definition of Demonic Possession
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I'm supposed to be going to Sri Lanka next year. I think I will stay away from the gin when I'm there.
Your mother sucks cocks in hell.
I was once talking on the phone to a friend who had just lost his mother. I was flailing around, wondering what to say, and for some God-awful reason that resonant line from the Exorcist sprang to mind and I said it, in some weird attempt to make light of the situation. A nanosecond later I thought OMFG what have I just said, he will now hate me forever, justifiably, but what I had said was so outrageous he didn’t notice. Like the famous video of the gorilla on the basketball court, perhaps
There’s an excellent passage in an otherwise middling David Baddiel novel where he talks about this. The strange desire to say the Worst thing possible, in awkward situations. He’s right. It exists
I wonder if it is akin to the stray furtive desire we all have, on occasion: to jump under a Tube Train, as it trundles in to the station
Toby Young is the extreme example of that.
Get him talking about why he wasn't convinced by the local state schools, and why he wanted to set up a state school doing things a bit differently, and he's sincere and cogent. And whilst he goes to far, there is a blob that needs poking from time to time.
But most of the time, he seems to be in a game of saying awful things, and making damn sure that his audience can't ignore them, even if they want to.
Evening. Is it taken for granted that the 54 threshold will be reached tomorrow?
No - because I suspect we will start to hear a new excuse that we need to wait until the Met has finished their investigation.
Not that it matters as I love the drip drip dripping away of any moral authority (in fact any authority or morals) that the Tory party used to be associated with.
Very good interview with Lord Sumption that I've just got round to hearing.
Makes perfect sense. Law is obscure so good luck with proving an actual offence under the ordinance, and of all the reasons to get rid of Boris having a birthday party is one of the more trivial.
Good to see one Eton and Oxford educated Tory making a dispassionate and objective case in defence of another... The Establishment protecting its own as per bloody usual.
Sumption was one of the main voices arguing against Johnson on Brexit.
Comments
Azeem Rafiq and Ebony Rainford-Brent expressed outrage after Mike O'Farrell told MPs young black players prefer football and south Asian communities prioritise education.
O'Farrell's comments were immediately likened with the career-ending words of former FA chairman Greg Clarke, who told the same committee in 2020 that south Asian people choose careers in IT over sport.
"The other thing in the diversity bit is that the football and rugby world becomes much more attractive to the Afro-Caribbean community," said the Middlesex chief as he sat alongside other county chairmen at the first parliamentary hearing on cricket since Rafiq's bombshell evidence last November.
"And in terms of the South Asian community, there is a moment where we're finding that they do not want necessarily to commit the same time that is necessary to go to the next step because they sometimes prefer to go into other educational fields, and then cricket becomes secondary. And part of that is because it's a rather more time-consuming sport than some others. So we're finding that's difficult."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2022/01/25/middlesex-chairman-facing-backlash-outdated-claim-black-people/
https://twitter.com/thhamilton/status/1486037897275125762
Legally, the position may not be the same. This does not matter politically because the criticism to be made of him is a political one.
But it is important to note that when it comes to charging people (including the PM) with criminal offences, the law - ie what the Regulations actually said at the relevant times - matters a great deal.
That's my point. So do not be surprised to find that charges may not follow quite as easily as some are supposing. I certainly wouldn't be, especially given what happened to previous prosecutions when the CPS looked at them.
If Tory MPs had any gumption, all this would be irrelevant because they would have got rid of him long before.
An inadequate grammar is extremely rare but would also see a loss of pupils if it fell below the results of an average comprehensive
“In the entry article on Dissociative Identity Disorder, the DSM-5 states, "possession-form identities in dissociative identity disorder typically manifest as behaviors that appear as if a 'spirit,' supernatural being, or outside person has taken control such that the individual begins speaking or acting in a distinctly different manner".[97] The symptoms vary across cultures.[90] The DSM-5 indicates that personality states of dissociative identity disorder may be interpreted as possession in some cultures, and instances of spirit possession are often related to traumatic experiences—suggesting that possession experiences may be caused by mental distress.[96] In cases of dissociative identity disorder in which the alter personality is questioned as to its identity, 29 percent are reported to identify themselves as demons.[98] A 19th century term for a mental disorder in which the patient believes that they are possessed by demons or evil spirits is demonomania or cacodemonomanis.[99]”
Germany went through the traumatic state of the First World War, then the Spanish Flu, THEN the great inflation, Great Depression, Weimar chaos. It was multiply traumatised, it was a national personality ripe for Possession
The Demonic Spirit of a half starved, quarter Slavic, obscure but hideously evil Austrian ex-soldier then took possession of the German soul, or persona, causing it to act in extremely unusual ways, including mass murder (cf Linda Blair murdering the Englishman in the Exorcist)
Germany went from speaking like a normal European nation to growling in guttural and atavistic ways, its head twisted 180 degrees away from the nation that gave us Goethe, Bach and Beethoven
I was a half-decent wrist spin bowler at 14, but never in a month of Sundays was it ever an option for me. Education came first.
Yes there are exceptions and some Indian pupils want to be cricketers not doctors and some black pupils who prefer football to cricket but those statements are true generally
- Bruno Ganz in Liam Neeson's ,,Unbekannt".
ETA that looks rather comfortable
So, I headed down the bookstore and asked the assistant if she'd heard of it and if they had it.
She said that my description rang a bell, but she wasn't sure if it was there or not.
https://twitter.com/DPMcBride/status/1486067085092524043
Is it “racist” to observe that West Indians in the West Indies are turning to basketball, over cricket? No. So why is this any different?
And South Asian parents MASSIVELY prioritise formal education over everything else. It’s probably a good thing, but comes with issues. Is there a South Asian mother in the country who would say Yes try and become a cricketer rather than Yes try and become a doctor?
That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist...
It was one of the reasons we didn't have Sky for so long.
But, oddly, that never seemed to affect recruitment. It may have been lucky that the nearest comps - Oxstalls, Beaudesert and Severn Vale - were not brilliant themselves.
Everyone knows this.
If you are poor and cannot afford private school fees and in the catchment area of an inadequate comp or academy however and not religious so you cannot get into a top church school which takes pupils based on church attendance, then you have no choice but to attend it
There’s a group of committed rebels, there’s a group of committed loyalists (you can normally tell them from very rubbish hair styles), and then a great mass of bewildered in the middle, some lean this way, some that, bewildered because 5 months ago there was no crisis, back in May they felt indestructible for a generation, and in all honesty they are waiting to see if it blows over and waiting to see if Boris ratings can recover. That’s the truest of true picture, so cut out “it’s because they are spineless” stuff because it is rubbish.
Someone coming out bath now gotta put pad down shhhhhhh
Literally
How can poorer families afford this ?
https://twitter.com/mattprior13/status/1483883226754174977?s=21
NI STV also ensures lots of Unionist MLAs get elected even if multiple Unionist parties
Makes one proud to be British, doesn't it?
In the case of Yorkshire, for example, the mystery is why so few of those of Pakistani origin have made the grade in cricket, when there are dozens of Pakistani-based leagues in Bradford, Leeds and the rest of West Yorkshire.
I'm not seeing anything on here so perhaps they're just building up their part?
Seriously, I have to hand it to ITV News, particularly but not exclusively Paul Brand. They've done some brilliant investigative journalism and Tom Bradby has reminded me of some of the great news anchors of yesteryear who weren't afraid to give an opinion when it was needed.
“Compared to what? The Bubonic Plague?”
I have zero regrets. I’d ambush him again if I had the chance! #no10party #BirthdayCake
https://twitter.com/No10Cake/status/1486068089334738947
There's an irony in there somewhere.
It will be an interesting day to say the least
I went to the superb Woodrush High School in Hollywood, Worcs. in the 1970s. It was well funded, it was in a good catchment area, it was full of young enthusiastic dynamic teachers, and the results were excellent. Now it's a dreary academy. You know the Grammar School I went to and I hated every moment I spent there, and the academic results weren't as clever as all that. 100% passes in O level Chemistry was achieved by anyone who might fail being pulled from the exam.
HY is talking through his partisan backside.
Throwing children on a scrap heap at 11 is immoral. Fund mainstream education properly and the world would be a better place. Academies are not that model.
And if it encourages BoJo to go, can we try pointing out that the only thing that makes King Alfred memorable is a story about cakes. So now he's got his place in history, can he please go away?
1/ Boris Johnson addressing MPs. He has vowed to speak to Parliament about the findings. Speaking as soon as it drops or soon after allows him to start rolling out the ‘change coming’ agenda even as MPs are digesting the findings. Which helps him politically.
2/ Sackings. There’s near universal acceptance among Tory MPs, advisers, people who have Boris’s ear that his inner circle will be shaken up. Again, gives him political cover. Loads of names speculated. Unclear how big. But departures (whether ‘sackings’ or ‘resignations’) likely
3/ Vows to overhaul the No 10 booze culture. Already floated by Oliver Dowden on a past media round. A ‘something went wrong and we’ll change it’ message. Possibly with hard new rules / promises (a booze ban one option reported in papers). Gives substance to the mea culpa.
4/ More no confidence letters. Some of the ‘we’re waiting for Sue Gray’ lines from Tory MPs may be buying time but others sound like they mean it. Some think it’s v possible - maybe probable - the 54 letters mark is hit in few days after Gray report. Which = up down vote on PM.
5/ A big row about how much of what Gray knows is made public. She’ll hand over her “findings”. But what about witness statements / photos / whatsapp messages? These aren’t expected but who knows. Likewise a row likely about how many attendees are named. Watch this space. [end]
https://twitter.com/benrileysmith/status/1486074902637694980
Boris Johnson.
"Have your cake and eat it",
That was your policy.
So the cake took its revenge,
and ambushed you.
Nadine Dorries and Therese Coffey crossed swords again over funding of Beeb - with @thejonnyreilly
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17439934/nadine-dorries-coffey-row-bbc-licence-fee-freeze/
There’s an excellent passage in an otherwise middling David Baddiel novel where he talks about this. The strange desire to say the Worst thing possible, in awkward situations. He’s right. It exists
I wonder if it is akin to the stray furtive desire we all have, on occasion: to jump under a Tube Train, as it trundles in to the station
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-inquiry-blows-boris-johnson-reboot-out-of-the-water-rndc8nmx6
They are getting those loyal MPs to try to persuade colleagues to get Johnson through this - arguing that he needs to be able to focus on the other issues on table - Ukraine/cost of living. 2/
But told even by those most loyal to the PM that they believe it will be a massive, uphill challenge to win back support of country and party - including in parliament - if (and it's obviously a big if) he gets through this 3/
In what sort of reminds me of the way that anger at Theresa May in 2017 immediately turned to key advisers, they are talking about "fundamental reform" of how Downing st operates (have heard much more scathing language on this pnt from Tory MPs who oppose Johnson) 4/
One MP said they felt it would need less a night of the long knives, and more a week of the machete. Though others I speak to really dislike that language - and really feel for officials - arguing that tone is always set from the top 5/
https://twitter.com/AnushkaAsthana/status/1486079739051839488
And maybe tomorrow Wile E Coyote will catch Road Runner too.
(And the book of poetry as a kid, the candle and the English translations of philosophical works are well known as well. Not to mention his piles.)
Get him talking about why he wasn't convinced by the local state schools, and why he wanted to set up a state school doing things a bit differently, and he's sincere and cogent. And whilst he goes to far, there is a blob that needs poking from time to time.
But most of the time, he seems to be in a game of saying awful things, and making damn sure that his audience can't ignore them, even if they want to.
Writeup;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60114588
“But the cake was not a cake
It was a custard pie.”
It means that it’s unlikely to be published until Thursday, although there’s still a World where No 10 gets it and publishes tomorrow
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1486082583981137922
Not that it matters as I love the drip drip dripping away of any moral authority (in fact any authority or morals) that the Tory party used to be associated with.
https://twitter.com/AlastairMeeks/status/1486079404631601165