On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Yes, and it provides context for the company's claim of financial necessity dictating its current actions. And of course they were aware of the pandemic and its likely implications at the time.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Hitler and his love of animals....
Mind you, Hitler did do *one thing* we can all agree was a good idea.
The only thing I can think of would be disapproved of by the Christians on the site.
I don't think he expressed an opinion on pineapple on pizza, and Radiohead hadn't been formed... What can you be thinking of?
Shooting himself in the head?
Yes. I understood that was a sin, and the Christian advice would be for him to have dedicated the rest of his life to repentance. Being dead he no longer had the opportunity to repent.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
Well we all got used to breaking laws during covid so I think that's partly it
You are Boris Johnson and I claim my five pounds.
Good news: Rishi has an aspiration to give you that five pounds in 2024.
I think Rishi is finished. Missed the boat. Had the chance to bring down the clown and his circus and failed. It will need to be a different Tory to try and salvage what is left of Conservative credibility.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
I try to live in the manner of Gibbons' description of the barbarian. My liberty is to act on the whim of the moment. My courage is to live with the consequences.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
But BigG assures us that Putin is a communist, so clearly will be well up there with progressive thought.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
Well we all got used to breaking laws during covid so I think that's partly it
You are Boris Johnson and I claim my five pounds.
Good news: Rishi has an aspiration to give you that five pounds in 2024.
I think Rishi is finished. Missed the boat. Had the chance to bring down the clown and his circus and failed. It will need to be a different Tory to try and salvage what is left of Conservative credibility.
It may well but he will be in the mix though I am annoyed he did not do more for the lower paid and those on benefits
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Seems to me that the polls are all showing Labour's lead increasing post budget, just the degree to which it has done, is what is making the difference.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
But BigG assures us that Putin is a communist, so clearly will be well up there with progressive thought.
What's that? Oh, my ironymeter just exploded.
He rules like a communist though he is corrupt and a war criminal
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
DP World paid out dividends. P&O Ferries is a modest fraction of DP World.
Yep, the owner. Nice dividend there.
I don't see the sense in profitable parts of a business endlessly cross-subsidising unprofitable parts (though I've disputed how unprofitable P&O were).
The Left has got itself in an awful mess reflexively opposing any company that wants to improve its efficiency and profitability. But looking at it from a Utopian point of view, doing the things we need and want to do more efficiently makes it possible for us to work less and be richer - is only we can make sure that everyone benefits from improved productivity, and not just the owners.
Keeping everything in stasis stops us from ever making things better.
That may be true, but in this case there are two separate issues.
One is economic, and the directors of P&O have some fair points, at the very least to argue. The problem of our interaction with, and competition with large parts of the globe with lower wages can't be wished away.
The other is their decision blatantly to ignore the requirements of the law - and the authorities' apparent unwillingness to do anything of consequence about it. One of our competitive advantages is the comparative certainty and enforceability of UK law, alongside a comparatively law abiding society. Recently we seem to have forgotten that.
Seems to me that the polls are all showing Labour's lead increasing post budget, just the degree to which it has done, is what is making the difference.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
Bit early to draw conclusions on post-Spring Statement polling.
You do wonder how Putin views the west taking action to rid themselves of his oil and gas in the next decade or more, and how much he may want to continue the conflict and expand it if his economy is threatened in this way
Seems to me that the polls are all showing Labour's lead increasing post budget, just the degree to which it has done, is what is making the difference.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
Bit early to draw conclusions on post-Spring Statement polling.
Today's the first one and I expect labour to grow their lead but if not, questions will be raised a to why not
If you forced me to go out on a limb and predict the next GE result today, I'd say a 4-5 point Labour win. Would put Labour close but no cigar on not needing SNP support as part of their coalition forming.
This would be on the back of a rough 2 years economically and on further bad Johnson scandal hitting home with voters (the party continuing financial relationships with oligarchs without much care to their views being my current likeliest). I'm agnostic on whether Boris goes in this scenario, depends on the size of the scandal, but that in turn dictates how low the Tories sink.
The 4-5% win contains significant swing back from a Tory low point.
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
DP World paid out dividends. P&O Ferries is a modest fraction of DP World.
Yep, the owner. Nice dividend there.
I don't see the sense in profitable parts of a business endlessly cross-subsidising unprofitable parts (though I've disputed how unprofitable P&O were).
The Left has got itself in an awful mess reflexively opposing any company that wants to improve its efficiency and profitability. But looking at it from a Utopian point of view, doing the things we need and want to do more efficiently makes it possible for us to work less and be richer - is only we can make sure that everyone benefits from improved productivity, and not just the owners.
Keeping everything in stasis stops us from ever making things better.
That may be true, but in this case there are two separate issues.
One is economic, and the directors of P&O have some fair points, at the very least to argue. The problem of our interaction with, and competition with large parts of the globe with lower wages can't be wished away.
The other is their decision blatantly to ignore the requirements of the law - and the authorities' apparent unwillingness to do anything of consequence about it. One of our competitive advantages is the comparative certainty and enforceability of UK law, alongside a comparatively law abiding society. Recently we seem to have forgotten that.
Yes, my point is less relevant to the example of P&O, because simply finding staff who will work for less isn't* a productivity improvement.
* Well. I suppose you could argue that it improves the allocation of skilled labour across the economy as a whole, but it's a stretch.
Seems to me that the polls are all showing Labour's lead increasing post budget, just the degree to which it has done, is what is making the difference.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
Bit early to draw conclusions on post-Spring Statement polling.
Today's the first one and I expect labour to grow their lead but if not, questions will be raised a to why not
Questions will only be asked by Tories.
Labour has taken the lead on the economy, these sorts of polls have always preceded Labour leads in the past, so whilst it may not be today, over the next few months, Labour will almost certainly be more than 10 points ahead. I would bet on it if anyone would take such a bet.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
Slightly hyperbolic. People take liberties with the law all the time. Do I speed, do I have more people in my house than the law says I'm allowed, etc. The law remains intact and people are aware of the consequences. And as you seem to be saying it is not "even" a criminal law issue.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
DP World paid out dividends. P&O Ferries is a modest fraction of DP World.
Yep, the owner. Nice dividend there.
I don't see the sense in profitable parts of a business endlessly cross-subsidising unprofitable parts (though I've disputed how unprofitable P&O were).
The Left has got itself in an awful mess reflexively opposing any company that wants to improve its efficiency and profitability. But looking at it from a Utopian point of view, doing the things we need and want to do more efficiently makes it possible for us to work less and be richer - is only we can make sure that everyone benefits from improved productivity, and not just the owners.
Keeping everything in stasis stops us from ever making things better.
Well you get more efficient to create wealth, then it's about who benefits. In recent times this increasingly seems to be owners of capital and senior executives rather than the workers. It should be an objective of the left imo to turn that around.
But this case just looks like an extreme 'bad capitalism' example - regardless of the legal arguments it's surely wrong to sack a workforce and immediately replace them with people doing the same jobs for peanuts.
Seems to me that the polls are all showing Labour's lead increasing post budget, just the degree to which it has done, is what is making the difference.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
Bit early to draw conclusions on post-Spring Statement polling.
Today's the first one and I expect labour to grow their lead but if not, questions will be raised a to why not
Questions will only be asked by Tories.
Labour has taken the lead on the economy, these sorts of polls have always preceded Labour leads in the past, so whilst it may not be today, over the next few months, Labour will almost certainly be more than 10 points ahead. I would bet on it if anyone would take such a bet.
You do wonder how Putin views the west taking action to rid themselves of his oil and gas in the next decade or more, and how much he may want to continue the conflict and expand it if his economy is threatened in this way
I really hope, not but Putin is very dangerous
I would suggest that the recent record of those who have tried to discern Putin's views suggests that wondering about them is a waste of time.
We can do no more than prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
Well we all got used to breaking laws during covid so I think that's partly it
You are Boris Johnson and I claim my five pounds.
Good news: Rishi has an aspiration to give you that five pounds in 2024.
I think Rishi is finished. Missed the boat. Had the chance to bring down the clown and his circus and failed. It will need to be a different Tory to try and salvage what is left of Conservative credibility.
It may well but he will be in the mix though I am annoyed he did not do more for the lower paid and those on benefits
The hints have been there for quite a while. The initial furlough scheme was impressive, but otherwise he has always been a straightforward small tax-tiny state-wishes we were like the USA right winger.
And unlike Maggie, or even Cameron, there is nothing I am aware of in his personal, professional or political story to disabuse him of the notion that life is more complicated than the Ladybird book of Small State Libertarianism.
(But yes. When Boris's neck was on the block, Rishi had the axe in his hands and he blinked. That blink will be remembered- by the party, by Rishi and most of all by Boris.)
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
"Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything."
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
Based on a uniform swing calculator? We know there won’t be uniform swing because Tories own the midlands battle ground whilst labour are stacking up valueless votes in metropolitan areas.
Save your fingers rather posting this after every poll.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
"Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything."
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
OK, point me to interesting Orwell with is neither reportage nor satire
It's a pretty blatant attempt to get people to accuse JK Rowling of being a Putinist and stir up more division within the West.
Thanks for explaining it to me.
Next, Putin sows discord by suggesting that a certain potboiler writer not being famous enough to cancel is a woke plot. Of course accusing him of being a Putinist might have had a certain resonance just a few weeks ago. Might still do in fact, despte the squawking equivocation.
Based on a uniform swing calculator? We know there won’t be uniform swing because Tories own the midlands battle ground whilst labour are stacking up valueless votes in metropolitan areas.
Save your fingers rather posting this after every poll.
On regional numbers Labour have a big 50% to 28% lead in London and also lead 44% to 34% in the North.
The Midlands is now tied with the Tories and Labour on 36% each and the Tories lead in the South still 40% to 31% with the LDs on 14%. The SNP lead on the Scottish subsample 39% to 20% for the SCons and 19% for SLab https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/6t7qu7kot7/TheTimes_VI_220323_W.pdf
oh, and latest YouGov (taken after Spring Statement) has Labour's lead cut to 2%
Lab 37 Cons 35 LD 10
Those looking for a Tory lead might still win their bet.
I don’t think this will last though, cost of living is going to bite especially as we go into April.
Labour 2% ahead after apparently the worst spring statement ever, Partygate , 12 years of tory power etc etc.
Bearing in mind that a year ago Starmer was apparently due to resign, Johnson was plotting a decade in power and the Tories looked unable to drop below 40%, I think you'll agree they've done well since.
The Local By- Election results for Labour over the past year have been awful for an opposition party who have been in opposition for 12 years. They have not done well at all. Polls win you nothing.
Labour expectometer...
Lab fail to gain Wandsworth - Piss poor night Lab Gain Wandsworth - Expected. Lab gain Barnet - Good night Lab gain Westminster - Starmer on his way to No 10 probably.
No I'm not from London, but they're 1-2, Evens and 2-1 shots at the bookies for Labour whereas not sure of competitive odds for elsewhere.
On current polling, minus Kantar, Labour should likely gain all 3.
If Labour fail to gain Barnet and Westminster, then given 2 out of 3 Barnet seats are in the top 50 Labour target seats and Cities of London and Westminster is in the top 100 Labour target seats then the Tories will likely at least keep most seats. That would be a bad night for Labour.
If Labour fail to even gain Wandsworth then Labour could even be going backwards as all 3 Wandsworth MPs after Labour gained Putney in 2019 are now Labour
Based on national polls? What about local factors? Such as the smart political bet is Labour make no progress at all in Barnet because it’s only just over two years ago they were a rabid anti Semitic party with all Labours current top team in that rabid anti Semitic leadership and not resigning from it. That has to be taken into account too doesn’t it, that it’s far too soon for Jewish voters to return on mass to Labour, especially when decent other options or sit on vote is available? When we are cock sure of future vote outcomes in these threadettes, we have to consider local factors not just polling numbers? One fact we do know about the coming election nights we have learnt from previous, results will be lumpy, huge step forwards there, perhaps by surprise, gone nowhere here, another surprise. This site is about taking that surprise out of it, such as no one on PB is shocked in future by Bristol’s Green Mayor, and 3 Green MPs from Bristol, because I have, via Snooks, told you it’s happening.
Careful now! Implying a Jewish bloc vote might be thought a sign of antisemitism.
What Corbynite bully boys gave that junk post 2 likes? Own up. 😠You ain’t going to bully me, I have facts on my side. Take a look at what did happened in Jewish areas last time. And explain why it should be any different this time.
Labour still have a big problem. Reputations are ripped up very quickly, take a long time to put back together again.
You do wonder how Putin views the west taking action to rid themselves of his oil and gas in the next decade or more, and how much he may want to continue the conflict and expand it if his economy is threatened in this way
I really hope, not but Putin is very dangerous
I would suggest that the recent record of those who have tried to discern Putin's views suggests that wondering about them is a waste of time.
We can do no more than prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Views of Putin seemed to be in 2 groups
1) It's all about the money 2) He was (and is) a Greater Russian Nationalist.
The main backers of group 1 seemed to be those for whom 2 was unthinkable
You do wonder how Putin views the west taking action to rid themselves of his oil and gas in the next decade or more, and how much he may want to continue the conflict and expand it if his economy is threatened in this way
I really hope, not but Putin is very dangerous
I would suggest that the recent record of those who have tried to discern Putin's views suggests that wondering about them is a waste of time.
We can do no more than prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Views of Putin seemed to be in 2 groups
1) It's all about the money 2) He was (and is) a Greater Russian Nationalist.
The main backers of group 1 seemed to be those for whom 2 was unthinkable
Question for the legal eagles. Just reading about new law about mobile usage while driving. I notice there is an exemption for using a phone as a sat-nav if it is in a cradle. That obviously refers to the fact you have Waze on and it is showing you the route, but are you technically allowed to touch the phone if Waze say pops up something that requires tapping? Or is it simply referring to passive action of observing the route?
You can't interact with it for:
illuminating the screen checking the time checking notifications unlocking the device making, receiving, or rejecting a telephone or internet based call sending, receiving or uploading oral or written content sending, receiving or uploading a photo or video utilising camera, video, or sound recording drafting any text accessing any stored data such as documents, books, audio files, photos, videos, films, playlists, notes or messages accessing an app accessing the internet
When does Waze require you to tap?
Unintended consequences if there is no exemption for using the phone to make emergency calls, for instance to alert police to accidents or someone driving the wrong way down a motorway.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Hitler and his love of animals....
Mind you, Hitler did do *one thing* we can all agree was a good idea.
The only thing I can think of would be disapproved of by the Christians on the site.
I don't think he expressed an opinion on pineapple on pizza, and Radiohead hadn't been formed... What can you be thinking of?
Hitler had a little known fasciation with computing machinery (hence all the IBM machines and the Z3)
In his papers, the Soviets found the the outlines for a scripting language to be used for carrying out computations...... named after his fascination with South American snakes...... But he decided that it was a vile idea and should never be implemented.
Doing lots of Covid daze telly atm and caught a Hitler doc - there really is limitless stuff on him, isn't there? - the angle for this one being the grandiose architectural and population control plans he had for "Germania", the 3rd Reich, in the event of victory. Every conquered country throughout the world was going to get its brand new Nazi capital, complete with monumental amphitheatre in the centre where its Hitler rep - or the man himself if visiting - could preside over huge, stage-managed events for its freshly imported Aryan population, the 'legacy' people having been either eliminated or working as slaves off campus (as it were). Absolutely barking. We really dodged a bullet there.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
"Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything."
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
"Notes on Nationalism" is offensive about the nationalism(s) that the person in question approve of.
Personally, I find the image of the Corbynism being a mirror image of Blimp Toryism funny and true.
Question for the legal eagles. Just reading about new law about mobile usage while driving. I notice there is an exemption for using a phone as a sat-nav if it is in a cradle. That obviously refers to the fact you have Waze on and it is showing you the route, but are you technically allowed to touch the phone if Waze say pops up something that requires tapping? Or is it simply referring to passive action of observing the route?
You can't interact with it for:
illuminating the screen checking the time checking notifications unlocking the device making, receiving, or rejecting a telephone or internet based call sending, receiving or uploading oral or written content sending, receiving or uploading a photo or video utilising camera, video, or sound recording drafting any text accessing any stored data such as documents, books, audio files, photos, videos, films, playlists, notes or messages accessing an app accessing the internet
When does Waze require you to tap?
Unintended consequences if there is no exemption for using the phone to make emergency calls, for instance to alert police to accidents or someone driving the wrong way down a motorway.
There are some exemptions, including using a phone in a genuine emergency (such as calling 112 or 999 at the scene of an accident).
oh, and latest YouGov (taken after Spring Statement) has Labour's lead cut to 2%
Lab 37 Cons 35 LD 10
Some idiot yesterday asked me why I thought the chatterati had got it wrong. QED.
Don’t hide behind a bush, just post, it was a great and popular budget 😆
Not for the first time I have no idea what you mean.
I’ll keep it simply for you then, yes or no.
This was the most poorly received budget since the Tories returned to power in 2010. It’s a disaster of a budget, hated right across the political spectrum. This is a chancellor that increases, not cut tax take, he has increased taxes to the highest tax take since Labour thrown out of power in the fifties. He also claimed he has a plan. What he is actually giving us is at least three policy budgets a year, each one contradicting the last- this most ludicrous one yet is based around trying to nullify a tax he promised to introduce last time he spoke and still sticks by. Plan? 🤣
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
Well, we agree on O's Notes on Nationalism which contains buckets of his worst failing, a sentimentalisation of the English working class and their patriotism. That fecker spawned a load of 'I'm a lovely patriot and you're a ghastly nationalist' lads who are even more prevalent today.
I'm gathering from almost all the coverage that Ukraine is awash with patriotism and has thankfully managed to escape nationalism almost entirely.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Hitler and his love of animals....
Mind you, Hitler did do *one thing* we can all agree was a good idea.
The only thing I can think of would be disapproved of by the Christians on the site.
I don't think he expressed an opinion on pineapple on pizza, and Radiohead hadn't been formed... What can you be thinking of?
Hitler had a little known fasciation with computing machinery (hence all the IBM machines and the Z3)
In his papers, the Soviets found the the outlines for a scripting language to be used for carrying out computations...... named after his fascination with South American snakes...... But he decided that it was a vile idea and should never be implemented.
Doing lots of Covid daze telly atm and caught a Hitler doc - there really is limitless stuff on him, isn't there? - the angle for this one being the grandiose architectural and population control plans he had for "Germania", the 3rd Reich, in the event of victory. Every conquered country throughout the world was going to get its brand new Nazi capital, complete with monumental amphitheatre in the centre where its Hitler rep - or the man himself if visiting - could preside over huge, stage-managed events for its freshly imported Aryan population, the 'legacy' people having been either eliminated or working as slaves off campus (as it were). Absolutely barking. We really dodged a bullet there.
I should use sarcasm tags more....
Some years ago, I noticed that in a series of sketches for the various buildings. Originally they were large - the triumphal arch was twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe etc. But after Speer came into the picture they exploded in scale to the truly insane stuff that we associate with Hitler...
Did Speer "release" Hitler's dreams of lunatic buildings? Or was Speer the one with the truly ludicrous visions?
Ben Wallace now clearly the most popular senior politician on a net favourable basis, ahead of the PM and other senior Cabinet Ministers and Starmer, having overtaken Sunak
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
I've just spent a few minutes trying to geolocate them in Google Maps, without much luck.
My WAG would be survey stations, but I have *never* seen any like that. Perhaps (again, WAG), lights were shone onto them from the tall colliery buildings, and the reflection showed any relative movements? But why would they be all on one 'side' of the colliery?
Perhaps a letter to the local paper / FB group, or a talk with the landowner?
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
Well, we agree on O's Notes on Nationalism which contains buckets of his worst failing, a sentimentalisation of the English working class and their patriotism. That fecker spawned a load of 'I'm a lovely patriot and you're a ghastly nationalist' lads who are even more prevalent today.
I'm gathering from almost all the coverage that Ukraine is awash with patriotism and has thankfully managed to escape nationalism almost entirely.
The Ukrainians aren't being nationalist, only for a strange definition of nationalism that would for example, say that the SNP aren't Scottish Nationalists.
Based on a uniform swing calculator? We know there won’t be uniform swing because Tories own the midlands battle ground whilst labour are stacking up valueless votes in metropolitan areas.
Save your fingers rather posting this after every poll.
On regional numbers Labour have a big 50% to 28% lead in London and also lead 44% to 34% in the North.
The Midlands is now tied with the Tories and Labour on 36% each and the Tories lead in the South still 40% to 31% with the LDs on 14%. The SNP lead on the Scottish subsample 39% to 20% for the SCons and 19% for SLab https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/6t7qu7kot7/TheTimes_VI_220323_W.pdf
That’s better way of explaining what is really happening. It’s lumpy and regional. Labour supporters take solace in the misleading and fools gold national poll leads, and people feeding them into the seat projections, by presenting it like this it shows even at this mid term nadir for the Tories Labour won’t get the seat numbers to force change of government.
1in16 had COVID last week. Lumme. Thought it was just my circle.
Scotland its even higher, 1 in 11 people.
Big O.B2 is well rife.
Glad my elderly folks are getting jabbed up again tomorrow.
No doubt hoving into view just in time to fuck up the Easter holidays, just like it fucked up half term, and Christmas, and virtually every plan we have made to do anything or go anywhere since March 2020...
Ben Wallace now clearly the most popular senior politician ahead of the PM and other senior Cabinet Ministers and Starmer, having overtaken Sunak
That is interesting, because this is obviously a war boost which shows that such a thing is available, just Johnson is not getting it. And truss getting a deboost.
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
Based on a uniform swing calculator? We know there won’t be uniform swing because Tories own the midlands battle ground whilst labour are stacking up valueless votes in metropolitan areas.
Save your fingers rather posting this after every poll.
On regional numbers Labour have a big 50% to 28% lead in London and also lead 44% to 34% in the North.
The Midlands is now tied with the Tories and Labour on 36% each and the Tories lead in the South still 40% to 31% with the LDs on 14%. The SNP lead on the Scottish subsample 39% to 20% for the SCons and 19% for SLab https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/6t7qu7kot7/TheTimes_VI_220323_W.pdf
That’s better way of explaining what is really happening. It’s lumpy and regional. Labour supporters take solace in the misleading and fools gold national poll leads, and people feeding them into the seat projections, by presenting it like this it shows even at this mid term nadir for the Tories Labour won’t get the seat numbers to force change of government.
They will, if they get SNP confidence and supply, whether you look at the national numbers or the regional breakdown
oh, and latest YouGov (taken after Spring Statement) has Labour's lead cut to 2%
Lab 37 Cons 35 LD 10
Some idiot yesterday asked me why I thought the chatterati had got it wrong. QED.
Don’t hide behind a bush, just post, it was a great and popular budget 😆
Not for the first time I have no idea what you mean.
I’ll keep it simply for you then, yes or no.
This was the most poorly received budget since the Tories returned to power in 2010. It’s a disaster of a budget, hated right across the political spectrum. This is a chancellor that increases, not cut tax take, he has increased taxes to the highest tax take since Labour thrown out of power in the fifties. He also claimed he has a plan. What he is actually giving us is at least three policy budgets a year, each one contradicting the last- this most ludicrous one yet is based around trying to nullify a tax he promised to introduce last time he spoke and still sticks by. Plan? 🤣
Gosh. I was simply posting that the initial post budget polls show little real change in the public mood - despite all the bad publicity. I think that the commentators simply don't get the public mood. Most I suspect are aware how awful the situation is all over Europe and much of the world. If they truly blamed it all on the current government why is the Tory vote holding up? Of course time may change the current position but the doommongers on here and in the media have been banging on about Boris/parties/prices , etc, etc for several weeks now. Certainly reading the views of you and your ilk about the budget hardly suggests the public have caight up with you yet. Or maybe you're all just a bit wrong.
For all the partisan ramping on both sides, it seems to me. The government is unpopular. People aren't convinced by the Labour alternative. Hence the LD's and Greens win when they are anywhere close enough to do so. It's all to play for. Cost of living hasn't kicked in properly yet. I can see anything from re-elected comfortably to Labour minority without even needing the SNP. The variables (war. How long? Weeks? Years? And cost of living. Just how bad. And the PM's character), are greater than any time I can remember. Anyone projecting with certainty is doing exactly that. Projecting.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Hitler and his love of animals....
Mind you, Hitler did do *one thing* we can all agree was a good idea.
The only thing I can think of would be disapproved of by the Christians on the site.
I don't think he expressed an opinion on pineapple on pizza, and Radiohead hadn't been formed... What can you be thinking of?
Hitler had a little known fasciation with computing machinery (hence all the IBM machines and the Z3)
In his papers, the Soviets found the the outlines for a scripting language to be used for carrying out computations...... named after his fascination with South American snakes...... But he decided that it was a vile idea and should never be implemented.
Doing lots of Covid daze telly atm and caught a Hitler doc - there really is limitless stuff on him, isn't there? - the angle for this one being the grandiose architectural and population control plans he had for "Germania", the 3rd Reich, in the event of victory. Every conquered country throughout the world was going to get its brand new Nazi capital, complete with monumental amphitheatre in the centre where its Hitler rep - or the man himself if visiting - could preside over huge, stage-managed events for its freshly imported Aryan population, the 'legacy' people having been either eliminated or working as slaves off campus (as it were). Absolutely barking. We really dodged a bullet there.
I should use sarcasm tags more....
Some years ago, I noticed that in a series of sketches for the various buildings. Originally they were large - the triumphal arch was twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe etc. But after Speer came into the picture they exploded in scale to the truly insane stuff that we associate with Hitler...
Did Speer "release" Hitler's dreams of lunatic buildings? Or was Speer the one with the truly ludicrous visions?
No, don't worry, I wasn't nodding at your "Hitler the techie nerd" theory. It sounded satirical.
Speer, yep, that's the guy. He specialized in tickling the Fuhrer's fancy - so he'd be asked for something enormous and come back with something beyond that. Apparently he specifically considered how a building would look in 1000s of years when it crumbled and the idea was these relics of the Reich would have the gravitas of Ancient Greek or Roman ruins.
Lucky to have escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg if you ask me.
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
Grain storage?
Could well be for monitoring mining subsidence. They make me think of corner reflectors for lasers -
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
"Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything."
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
Aside from beer and loafing, Dylan Thomas was rude about pretty much everything and everyone.
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
According to that article, DP World had no choice as it was "legally obliged" to pay out the £270m in dividends. Funny that - I thought they were comfortable with breaking the law.
More the reason for House of Commons to consign P&O CEO to the pokey (for day, a week, a month, a year?) for his blatant, outrageous Contempt of Parliament.
Personally would stake the fucker out in front of Wapping at low tide - tradition punishment for pirates.
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
I've just spent a few minutes trying to geolocate them in Google Maps, without much luck.
My WAG would be survey stations, but I have *never* seen any like that. Perhaps (again, WAG), lights were shone onto them from the tall colliery buildings, and the reflection showed any relative movements? But why would they be all on one 'side' of the colliery?
Perhaps a letter to the local paper / FB group, or a talk with the landowner?
No idea. If there were just one, I'd have guessed some form of sun dial. But 4???
Wildly off topic, but I wonder if the educated and worldly wise inhabitants of this forum can identify the structure pictured below.
There’s four of them spaced seemingly randomly in a field I walk the dogs in. They’re solid concrete boxes, standing just under six feet high, on a solid metal pole. One side is angled and pressed into that face is a concave pyramidal mirror.
No idea how long they’ve been there but at least six years, that’s how long I’ve lived near them. They all face due west. They don’t seem to be maintained in any way.
They’re a few hundred metres south west from the old Kellingley Colliery site, so I wondered if they’re anything to do with monitoring subsidence, but that’s just a wild guess. Are they for the alignment of something?
Any ideas?
Edit: Not sure why some of the images have spun round.
Four of them and that one is numbered No.6.
Curiouser and curiouser.
They look a bit like radar reflectors, so it could well be subsidence monitoring.
There are some modern ones on Hatfield Moors (not that far from Kellingley as the crow flies) made out of metal with the same concave pyramidal mirror, and I know those were placed for satellite radar calibration.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Hitler and his love of animals....
Mind you, Hitler did do *one thing* we can all agree was a good idea.
The only thing I can think of would be disapproved of by the Christians on the site.
I don't think he expressed an opinion on pineapple on pizza, and Radiohead hadn't been formed... What can you be thinking of?
Hitler had a little known fasciation with computing machinery (hence all the IBM machines and the Z3)
In his papers, the Soviets found the the outlines for a scripting language to be used for carrying out computations...... named after his fascination with South American snakes...... But he decided that it was a vile idea and should never be implemented.
Doing lots of Covid daze telly atm and caught a Hitler doc - there really is limitless stuff on him, isn't there? - the angle for this one being the grandiose architectural and population control plans he had for "Germania", the 3rd Reich, in the event of victory. Every conquered country throughout the world was going to get its brand new Nazi capital, complete with monumental amphitheatre in the centre where its Hitler rep - or the man himself if visiting - could preside over huge, stage-managed events for its freshly imported Aryan population, the 'legacy' people having been either eliminated or working as slaves off campus (as it were). Absolutely barking. We really dodged a bullet there.
I should use sarcasm tags more....
Some years ago, I noticed that in a series of sketches for the various buildings. Originally they were large - the triumphal arch was twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe etc. But after Speer came into the picture they exploded in scale to the truly insane stuff that we associate with Hitler...
Did Speer "release" Hitler's dreams of lunatic buildings? Or was Speer the one with the truly ludicrous visions?
No, don't worry, I wasn't nodding at your "Hitler the techie nerd" theory. It sounded satirical.
Speer, yep, that's the guy. He specialized in tickling the Fuhrer's fancy - so he'd be asked for something enormous and come back with something beyond that. Apparently he specifically considered how a building would look in 1000s of years when it crumbled and the idea was these relics of the Reich would have the gravitas of Ancient Greek or Roman ruins.
Lucky to have escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg if you ask me.
He was lucky, arguably a much better case against him than say Streicher who was a comic book antisemite, but virtually irrelevant to how the Nazi regime conducted itself.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
Well, we agree on O's Notes on Nationalism which contains buckets of his worst failing, a sentimentalisation of the English working class and their patriotism. That fecker spawned a load of 'I'm a lovely patriot and you're a ghastly nationalist' lads who are even more prevalent today.
I'm gathering from almost all the coverage that Ukraine is awash with patriotism and has thankfully managed to escape nationalism almost entirely.
The Ukrainians aren't being nationalist, only for a strange definition of nationalism that would for example, say that the SNP aren't Scottish Nationalists.
There are potentially an infinite number of forms of nationalism, from the toxic to the laudable; after all, at root it denotes only the desire to form or maintain a nation state.
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Its parent company paid a dividend? How does that answer anything?
DP World isn't required to bail out its loss making subsidiaries. It was distributing profits from its other enterprises.
It's not irrelevant though. If the owner has money coming out of their ears and at the same time is pulling this trick it might say something about their business ethics.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Orwell's main hustle was anti-authoritarianism (and pretty lefty looking authoritarianism, certainly in AF). Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything. There's a peculiarly dreary essay about nationalism which gets quoted with breathless approval, which contains a slap at Scottish separatism so wankerish that if it appeared on PB you'd think Oh fuck, _____ ________'s stupider younger brother has joined the conversation.
"Outwith that he hadn't much that was interesting to say about politics, or anything."
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
I was talking about the intelligence of Orwell's anti-nationalism, not the mere fact of it
What Dylan Thomas do you rate, incidentally, and why? I'd have said that Milk Wood was flattered by the Burton film, and if I never hear that DNGG thing again it'll be too soon
Or have you just looked him up on a spreadsheet of Really Important Poets?
You do wonder how Putin views the west taking action to rid themselves of his oil and gas in the next decade or more, and how much he may want to continue the conflict and expand it if his economy is threatened in this way
I really hope, not but Putin is very dangerous
With surprise, probably.
"For me the most revealing text here is the victory declaration, which the Russian press agency accidentally published on Feb. 26. What they say is that the West just basically needed one more push to fall into total disarray." https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1507345589448716303
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Its parent company paid a dividend? How does that answer anything?
DP World isn't required to bail out its loss making subsidiaries. It was distributing profits from its other enterprises.
It's not irrelevant though. If the owner has money coming out of their ears and at the same time is pulling this trick it might say something about their business ethics.
For those wondering what other bits of history Putin has been rewriting in his head...I have just been reminded of this, from January 2020: Putin has been blaming Poland for the start of the Second World War https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1507314856676020225
Was that in the same Putin speech that @Leon was cheerleading for?
Tsk. Remember liking Putin for quoting Martin Luther King is exactly the same as liking Wagner's music.
This makes perfect sense because Wagner is chiefly known for his racism, but he did do some composing on the side. And Putin is famous for his "brilliant" thoughts on equality, but not lot of people know that he is also a murderous dictator and war criminal.
Putin is murderous thug but he does have some valid points about woke and the decadence of western society...
Hmmm, hard to tell if that is a joke or not, but in case it isn't:
No he doesn't, or do you think the Putin regime has good policies that the rest of the world should follow in terms of race or gender equality or "decadence" or anything much else? Any gangster can mention Martin Luther King in a speech full of lies, it doesn't make them suddenly genius moral philosophers.
Quoting that MLK line against the left is usually trolling. Anybody who habitually does it - you can pretty much write them off as having anything of value to say about racism.
Poor old Orwell's going the same way. Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
Pretty big pockets ... Rand could have done with an editor.
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Its parent company paid a dividend? How does that answer anything?
DP World isn't required to bail out its loss making subsidiaries. It was distributing profits from its other enterprises.
It's not irrelevant though. If the owner has money coming out of their ears and at the same time is pulling this trick it might say something about their business ethics.
I'd have thought cross-channel ferries being essential to everybody, and impossible to profit from, were crying out to be nationalised
LD's winning here while losing vote share. Yet another local result off message. It's a mystery..
A 90 vote drop in support is moe stuff really in local elections. They might even be new voters.
But the government is so hated how can we credit even the tiniest increase in Tory votes? Anywhere? Don't forget yesterday's gain in Blyth? Explaining everything away week in and week out simply does not cut it I'm afraid.
Gut-wrenching news from Mariupol officials today. They report around 300 people who were sheltering in the Mariupol Drama Theater when Russia bombed it were killed in the attack. "The occupier knew what it was hitting...and the bombs fell anyway." https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1507334661227401223
On P&O, it's really complicated, isn't it? Far too hard to solve.
You have a CEO who has a salary of £325,000. He admits to knowingly breaking the law. Why? Because the company can't afford to pay a decent wage, and wants to pay its employees £5.50 an hour. By my calculations, the CEO earns £156 an hour (based on a 40-hour week). My heart bleeds.
But hey, that's just how the system works, and there's nothing we can do. Makes me wonder what the point of having a government is.
It's not a surprise they lost money in 2020 because the flipping pandemic meant everyone stayed at home. It says nothing about whether they need to cut staff costs to make a profit in 2023.
They did make an operating profit in 2019 though, so looks like the argument the company had to cut staff costs to survive as a going concern is cobblers. Never waste a good crisis, though.
Net result is that the British economy has fewer well-paid jobs and higher profits being remitted to foreign owners. Is that the direction of travel we are aiming for?
They also took well over £100m from Rishi in pandemic money.
Its parent company paid a dividend? How does that answer anything?
DP World isn't required to bail out its loss making subsidiaries. It was distributing profits from its other enterprises.
It's not irrelevant though. If the owner has money coming out of their ears and at the same time is pulling this trick it might say something about their business ethics.
I'd have thought cross-channel ferries being essential to everybody, and impossible to profit from, were crying out to be nationalised
British Railways took over the ferries from the railway companies in 1947 ...
LD's winning here while losing vote share. Yet another local result off message. It's a mystery..
A 90 vote drop in support is moe stuff really in local elections. They might even be new voters.
But the government is so hated how can we credit even the tiniest increase in Tory votes? Anywhere? Don't forget yesterday's gain in Blyth? Explaining everything away week in and week out simply does not cut it I'm afraid.
It was a hold, not a gained, with an increased majority percentage wise.
Amazing the number of people who think the law is something to be followed only when it is convenient for you to do so.
We truly are becoming more Italian by the day.
Anyway it is a gorgeous sunny day here so I'm off to enjoy it.
PS Breach of employment law is not a criminal offence. Breaches of Companies Act provisions can be. But all this seems entirely hypothetical these days. Law will end up like Latin - a dead language used for a few empty rituals - but otherwise totally ignored by the great, the good and everyone else.
This, I think, is an exaggeration hiding an interesting question or two. Most people most of the time are broadly law abiding over things that matter morally and are capable of being understood by normal people.
However there are some problems. here are three.
1) The weight of law has become impossibly complex, so you have no idea what is lawful and what is not
2) Enforcement is patchy. More or less every day I receive either fraudulent emails or fraudulent phone calls. The amount of card/bank account fraud is immense, and it is obvious there is no intention to do anything about any of it. So you just ignore, evade and take maximum care.
3) Courts now exist only for the very poor and the very rich or well funded.
Law is not at all dead. Look at the number of lawyers.
I think this is a very good comment.
The impentrability of the law is a problem, the operation of it, and the ridiculously counter productive pursuit of savings has only made it all worse.
Its about an initiative to get Russian speakers outside Russia to phone up Russians 'One on One' and talk about the war. I don't know how effective it will be. It seems that in many cases the Russians just parrot back what State TV has been telling them, for others they know what's happening but too scared to do anything about it. non the less I support it any cracks in the media wall should be tried, perhaps it will have some impact on some.
I don't speak Russian so can not help, but I would encourage anybody who does to give it a try.
My wife has this problem with half her family in Russia. There’s been years of media brainwashing, most outside sources of news are now blocked in Russia, and the state media is still going on about Nazis, chemical factories, and liberating the Donbass. No mention of the bombs raining on Kiev and Mariopol.
Thanks for sharing that, so so sad, its only at times like this when we realise how impotent Freedom of Speech/Free Press are.
Do you mind me asking has there been any change in Her family's opinion over the courses of the war? as in has anything your wife's been saying sunk in? or is it just rejected out of hand?
Apologies @BigRich for the late reply, been out all afternoon.
I think opinions are slowly changing, especially among the young and educated who can find international news. Still a long way to go for many of the older generations though, but yes it’s important to keep telling them how things really are. Russia is a really big place, most of which is quite insular in outlook, many outside the main cities won’t yet have noticed anything particularly wrong despite all the sanctions.
Ben Wallace now clearly the most popular senior politician ahead of the PM and other senior Cabinet Ministers and Starmer, having overtaken Sunak
That is interesting, because this is obviously a war boost which shows that such a thing is available, just Johnson is not getting it. And truss getting a deboost.
I'm not really a fan myself, but FWIW, a friend who is a senior civil servant (and privately a Labour Party member) and knows Wallace well rates him highly - says he was happy to be gotten out of bed at the crack of dawn to help sort Afghan refugee issues. Unlike some other Ministers, she adds pointedly.
oh, and latest YouGov (taken after Spring Statement) has Labour's lead cut to 2%
Lab 37 Cons 35 LD 10
Some idiot yesterday asked me why I thought the chatterati had got it wrong. QED.
Don’t hide behind a bush, just post, it was a great and popular budget 😆
Not for the first time I have no idea what you mean.
I’ll keep it simply for you then, yes or no.
This was the most poorly received budget since the Tories returned to power in 2010. It’s a disaster of a budget, hated right across the political spectrum. This is a chancellor that increases, not cut tax take, he has increased taxes to the highest tax take since Labour thrown out of power in the fifties. He also claimed he has a plan. What he is actually giving us is at least three policy budgets a year, each one contradicting the last- this most ludicrous one yet is based around trying to nullify a tax he promised to introduce last time he spoke and still sticks by. Plan? 🤣
Gosh. I was simply posting that the initial post budget polls show little real change in the public mood - despite all the bad publicity. I think that the commentators simply don't get the public mood. Most I suspect are aware how awful the situation is all over Europe and much of the world. If they truly blamed it all on the current government why is the Tory vote holding up? Of course time may change the current position but the doommongers on here and in the media have been banging on about Boris/parties/prices , etc, etc for several weeks now. Certainly reading the views of you and your ilk about the budget hardly suggests the public have caight up with you yet. Or maybe you're all just a bit wrong.
Yet again Felix, you hide behind polls to suggest the budget can’t be all that bad despite the Twitter chatter. Truth is, you won’t say it’s a good budget because it’s an indefensible budget.
Am I wrong? No.
“ If they truly blamed it all on the current government why is the Tory vote holding up? “
Because it’s not just budget at play in the polling. A whole lot of other things at play in the polling, including our government acting on our behalf in a major international war crisis.
LD's winning here while losing vote share. Yet another local result off message. It's a mystery..
?. Green candidate standing seems to explain it, otherwise looks like a pretty static result. Absolutely nothing to see here for anyone.
The Tory vote share rose, as it did in the Blyth seat and in Test valley. Week after week the Tories are often, not always, outperforming the polls and the doomsters on here. Something simply does not compute.
1in16 had COVID last week. Lumme. Thought it was just my circle.
Scotland its even higher, 1 in 11 people.
Big O.B2 is well rife.
Glad my elderly folks are getting jabbed up again tomorrow.
No doubt hoving into view just in time to fuck up the Easter holidays, just like it fucked up half term, and Christmas, and virtually every plan we have made to do anything or go anywhere since March 2020...
And yet, with so many with covid, so very few (relatively) in hospital and dying.
Comments
And of course they were aware of the pandemic and its likely implications at the time.
What's that? Oh, my ironymeter just exploded.
Righties are so uncool they have to go on the thieve for style, excepting the ones who proudly bear/bare their Richard Nixon tattoos and have their copies of Atlas Shrugged peeping coquettishly out of their pockets.
DP World isn't required to bail out its loss making subsidiaries. It was distributing profits from its other enterprises.
Labour is 37 to 40 depending on where you ask. With a good number of Lib Dems and Greens to squeeze, they'll be above 40 in any election IMHO. I wouldn't bet against them exceeding 1997's 43%
One is economic, and the directors of P&O have some fair points, at the very least to argue.
The problem of our interaction with, and competition with large parts of the globe with lower wages can't be wished away.
The other is their decision blatantly to ignore the requirements of the law - and the authorities' apparent unwillingness to do anything of consequence about it.
One of our competitive advantages is the comparative certainty and enforceability of UK law, alongside a comparatively law abiding society. Recently we seem to have forgotten that.
I really hope, not but Putin is very dangerous
Just would have been worth it to write “Vine tangles Tarzan in knots”.
This would be on the back of a rough 2 years economically and on further bad Johnson scandal hitting home with voters (the party continuing financial relationships with oligarchs without much care to their views being my current likeliest). I'm agnostic on whether Boris goes in this scenario, depends on the size of the scandal, but that in turn dictates how low the Tories sink.
The 4-5% win contains significant swing back from a Tory low point.
* Well. I suppose you could argue that it improves the allocation of skilled labour across the economy as a whole, but it's a stretch.
Labour has taken the lead on the economy, these sorts of polls have always preceded Labour leads in the past, so whilst it may not be today, over the next few months, Labour will almost certainly be more than 10 points ahead. I would bet on it if anyone would take such a bet.
But this case just looks like an extreme 'bad capitalism' example - regardless of the legal arguments it's surely wrong to sack a workforce and immediately replace them with people doing the same jobs for peanuts.
We can do no more than prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Curiouser and curiouser.
And unlike Maggie, or even Cameron, there is nothing I am aware of in his personal, professional or political story to disabuse him of the notion that life is more complicated than the Ladybird book of Small State Libertarianism.
(But yes. When Boris's neck was on the block, Rishi had the axe in his hands and he blinked. That blink will be remembered- by the party, by Rishi and most of all by Boris.)
LOL
I seem to recall that Dylan Thomas was pretty rude about Welsh nationalism. But, hey, he was a pretty two-bit poet. Almost as inconsequential as Orwell, come to that.
Truss is on -29%, Starmer is on -33%, Boris on -34% and Patel on -59%
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/25/rishi-sunaks-favourability-drops-new-low-following
Queen’s delight at display of hand-crafted artefacts at Windsor
https://www.standard.co.uk/video/highlights/queen-s-delight-at-display-of-hand-crafted-artefacts-at-windsor-vfd602021
Save your fingers rather posting this after every poll.
Next, Putin sows discord by suggesting that a certain potboiler writer not being famous enough to cancel is a woke plot. Of course accusing him of being a Putinist might have had a certain resonance just a few weeks ago. Might still do in fact, despte the squawking equivocation.
The Midlands is now tied with the Tories and Labour on 36% each and the Tories lead in the South still 40% to 31% with the LDs on 14%. The SNP lead on the Scottish subsample 39% to 20% for the SCons and 19% for SLab
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/6t7qu7kot7/TheTimes_VI_220323_W.pdf
Labour still have a big problem. Reputations are ripped up very quickly, take a long time to put back together again.
1) It's all about the money
2) He was (and is) a Greater Russian Nationalist.
The main backers of group 1 seemed to be those for whom 2 was unthinkable
It's pretty clear to all that it is 2, now.
Lumme. Thought it was just my circle.
Personally, I find the image of the Corbynism being a mirror image of Blimp Toryism funny and true.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2022/03/changes-to-mobile-phone-driving-laws-come-into-force-this-week/
This was the most poorly received budget since the Tories returned to power in 2010. It’s a disaster of a budget, hated right across the political spectrum. This is a chancellor that increases, not cut tax take, he has increased taxes to the highest tax take since Labour thrown out of power in the fifties. He also claimed he has a plan. What he is actually giving us is at least three policy budgets a year, each one contradicting the last- this most ludicrous one yet is based around trying to nullify a tax he promised to introduce last time he spoke and still sticks by. Plan? 🤣
Big O.B2 is well rife.
Glad my elderly folks are getting jabbed up again tomorrow.
Favourable: 36% (-3 from 22-23 Mar)
Unfavourable: 51% (+7%)
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/25/rishi-sunaks-favourability-drops-new-low-following?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=rishi_favourability https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1507344812025995272/photo/1
Favourable: 14%
Unfavourable: 73%
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/25/rishi-sunaks-favourability-drops-new-low-following?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=rishi_favourability https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1507344817575112711/photo/1
Starmer at -33 to Boris - 34 indicates neither are popular
Boris Johnson: -34 (-5 from 23-24 March)
Keir Starmer: -21 (-5)
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/03/25/rishi-sunaks-favourability-drops-new-low-following?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=rishi_favourability https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1507344822599831557/photo/1
I'm gathering from almost all the coverage that Ukraine is awash with patriotism and has thankfully managed to escape nationalism almost entirely.
Some years ago, I noticed that in a series of sketches for the various buildings. Originally they were large - the triumphal arch was twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe etc. But after Speer came into the picture they exploded in scale to the truly insane stuff that we associate with Hitler...
Did Speer "release" Hitler's dreams of lunatic buildings? Or was Speer the one with the truly ludicrous visions?
My WAG would be survey stations, but I have *never* seen any like that. Perhaps (again, WAG), lights were shone onto them from the tall colliery buildings, and the reflection showed any relative movements? But why would they be all on one 'side' of the colliery?
Perhaps a letter to the local paper / FB group, or a talk with the landowner?
LDEM: 46.0% (-4.9)
CON: 34.7% (+0.3)
LAB: 13.3% (-1.2)
GRN: 5.9% (+5.9)
Votes cast: 1,808
Liberal Democrat HOLD.
Labour supporters take solace in the misleading and fools gold national poll leads, and people feeding them into the seat projections, by presenting it like this it shows even at this mid term nadir for the Tories Labour won’t get the seat numbers to force change of government.
The government is unpopular.
People aren't convinced by the Labour alternative.
Hence the LD's and Greens win when they are anywhere close enough to do so.
It's all to play for. Cost of living hasn't kicked in properly yet.
I can see anything from re-elected comfortably to Labour minority without even needing the SNP. The variables (war. How long? Weeks? Years? And cost of living. Just how bad. And the PM's character), are greater than any time I can remember.
Anyone projecting with certainty is doing exactly that. Projecting.
Speer, yep, that's the guy. He specialized in tickling the Fuhrer's fancy - so he'd be asked for something enormous and come back with something beyond that. Apparently he specifically considered how a building would look in 1000s of years when it crumbled and the idea was these relics of the Reich would have the gravitas of Ancient Greek or Roman ruins.
Lucky to have escaped the death penalty at Nuremberg if you ask me.
Good to see this author in great company, maybe now she’ll see who her true allies are? Doubtful.
https://twitter.com/danieljfalconer/status/1507344294704816133
I wonder if Putin ever chats with JK Rowling and asks 'are we the baddies?'
https://twitter.com/joss_prior/status/1507344196260270080
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
But could be a radar reflector also - no idea which, though the polish suggests optical wavelengths.
Edit. @JosiasJessop has responded, I see.
Personally would stake the fucker out in front of Wapping at low tide - tradition punishment for pirates.
There are some modern ones on Hatfield Moors (not that far from Kellingley as the crow flies) made out of metal with the same concave pyramidal mirror, and I know those were placed for satellite radar calibration.
Bit scruffy looking though!
https://twitter.com/MarkHiggie1/status/1507299241969868803?s=20&t=pJsFO3eoaKGsBZdIfj4I0w
What Dylan Thomas do you rate, incidentally, and why? I'd have said that Milk Wood was flattered by the Burton film, and if I never hear that DNGG thing again it'll be too soon
Or have you just looked him up on a spreadsheet of Really Important Poets?
"For me the most revealing text here is the victory declaration, which the Russian press agency accidentally published on Feb. 26. What they say is that the West just basically needed one more push to fall into total disarray."
https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1507345589448716303
Macron 28%
Le Pen 19%
Melenchon 14.5%
Zemmour 11%
Pecresse 10.5%
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1507295548117864449?s=20&t=-Yxmk3lGJPlDvnjX66FMxA
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1507334661227401223
The impentrability of the law is a problem, the operation of it, and the ridiculously counter productive pursuit of savings has only made it all worse.
I think opinions are slowly changing, especially among the young and educated who can find international news. Still a long way to go for many of the older generations though, but yes it’s important to keep telling them how things really are. Russia is a really big place, most of which is quite insular in outlook, many outside the main cities won’t yet have noticed anything particularly wrong despite all the sanctions.
Am I wrong? No.
“ If they truly blamed it all on the current government why is the Tory vote holding up? “
Because it’s not just budget at play in the polling. A whole lot of other things at play in the polling, including our government acting on our behalf in a major international war crisis.
This wave will subside - see Denmark.
Alternatively, the two tweeters could just be a pair of wankers.