..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
Besides which, I'd like to know what the alternative to a large state is under present circumstances. We hear a lot about the tax burden being the highest it's been since the 1950s or whatever. What we don't hear is that modern Britain has a mean life expectancy about thirteen years greater than it was in 1950, and that the country is consequently rammed full of sick, disabled and very elderly people with all kinds of complex and expensive needs who would've died much sooner or not survived their conditions at all in decades past.
Add to the exploding pensions, medical and elderly care bills of the nation the need to cope with extended systemic neglect - which leaves us with police that frequently fail to investigate crimes (unless it's somebody hurting someone else's feelings on Twitter,) courts that take years to prosecute cases, armed forces with few personnel or much usable equipment left with which to defend the country, to name but a few examples - and a colossal national debt to be serviced, and it's clear that we need heaps and heaps of money.
Therefore, if you want a country that actually functions and that lives within its means rather than borrowing to spend, that means a big public sector with big taxes, as the Scandinavians have shown us. The alternative of a minimal state supposedly geared to promote growth, as seen in the USA - an ostensibly rich polity which is full of decaying infrastructure, rampant violent crime, vast income disparities and millions upon millions of people who barely survive in a condition of wretched poverty - demonstrably does not work.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
Any more than helping with old donkeys will SKS.
I disagree. His helping Corbyn has done some damage.
Half the 'traditional' East End claims to be related to the Kray twins, or friendly with people who were. Plus a significant part of south Essex.
Back in 92/93 I lived in a student flat in Stepney Green. One of our cleaners - a lady in her fifties or sixties - would talk about how much safer the streets were in the 1960s, and how the Krays kept the area in good order.
It was interesting to hear such a view first-hand; a bit like talking to someone who is an unapologetic Nazi. You know such people exist, but never expect to meet them...
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
I will admit it, when it came to time outside I paid no attention whatsoever to the so-called rules of lockdown. No one was going to dictate to me when or how often I could walk in the countryside. I didn't drive to places but I did walk out my door, often for whole days at a time.
I was, in fact, covered to do so by my mental health diagnosis but that's beside the point. No one should have allowed politicians or police to tell them how much fresh air they were entitled to breath or how long they could be outside or whether they could sit on a park bench.
Especially as that fuckwit in No.10 was all the while boozing it up.
Grrrrrrr.
You obviously don't live in Derbyshire where the police were waiting all over the place to catch people travelling from their home.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
Besides which, I'd like to know what the alternative to a large state is under present circumstances. We hear a lot about the tax burden being the highest it's been since the 1950s or whatever. What we don't hear is that modern Britain has a mean life expectancy about thirteen years greater than it was in 1950, and that the country is consequently rammed full of sick, disabled and very elderly people with all kinds of complex and expensive needs who would've died much sooner or not survived their conditions at all in decades past…
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
Yes - I was thinking of that as falling under the PCR testing heading. A system based largely on LFTs obviates any need for it.
Having said that was just trying to book a ticket for a gig, and it seems there is no way to do it without using a smartphone. Who takes a fucking phone with them to a gig?
You do. If you want to get in.
Luckily I have many other ways to amuse myself. The venue will just have to miss out on selling me their expensive beer.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
Besides which, I'd like to know what the alternative to a large state is under present circumstances. We hear a lot about the tax burden being the highest it's been since the 1950s or whatever. What we don't hear is that modern Britain has a mean life expectancy about thirteen years greater than it was in 1950, and that the country is consequently rammed full of sick, disabled and very elderly people with all kinds of complex and expensive needs who would've died much sooner or not survived their conditions at all in decades past.
Add to the exploding pensions, medical and elderly care bills of the nation the need to cope with extended systemic neglect - which leaves us with police that frequently fail to investigate crimes (unless it's somebody hurting someone else's feelings on Twitter,) courts that take years to prosecute cases, armed forces with few personnel or much usable equipment left with which to defend the country, to name but a few examples - and a colossal national debt to be serviced, and it's clear that we need heaps and heaps of money.
Therefore, if you want a country that actually functions and that lives within its means rather than borrowing to spend, that means a big public sector with big taxes, as the Scandinavians have shown us. The alternative of a minimal state supposedly geared to promote growth, as seen in the USA - an ostensibly rich polity which is full of decaying infrastructure, rampant violent crime, vast income disparities and millions upon millions of people who barely survive in a condition of wretched poverty - demonstrably does not work.
The Tories are the Party of the old. No one wants more public spending than the old. No one pays less tax. Therefore...
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
I'm sure someone made money out of it, so result in BJ world.
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
Although 'obscene' was tacked on after mentions of his actions, thus:
'What have you done?' cried Christine. 'You have wrecked the whole party machine! To lie in the nude may be rude But to lie in the House is obscene.'
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
Although 'obscene' was tacked on after mentions of his actions, thus:
'What have you done?' cried Christine. 'You have wrecked the whole party machine! To lie in the nude may be rude But to lie in the House is obscene.'
Well the Mail seems fine with lying in the House these days.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
Although 'obscene' was tacked on after mentions of his actions, thus:
'What have you done?' cried Christine. 'You have wrecked the whole party machine! To lie in the nude may be rude But to lie in the House is obscene.'
Well the Mail seems fine with lying in the House these days.
And cabinet ministers accepting donations from rich Russians passes mostly without comment or even a raised eyebrow. Funny old world.
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
A story that reached the Mail, and Wikipedia, only recently. The timing alongside the growing concerns about Starmer being 'boring' are, I am sure, entirely coincidental.
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
A striking statistic that I came across yesterday is that the size of the civil service (i.e. its workforce) has apparently increased by about 25% since 2016 - i.e. during the May and Johnson premierships.
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
Although 'obscene' was tacked on after mentions of his actions, thus:
'What have you done?' cried Christine. 'You have wrecked the whole party machine! To lie in the nude may be rude But to lie in the House is obscene.'
Well the Mail seems fine with lying in the House these days.
Seems to be more or less a requirement to serve in the Johnson government, so if they want it to continue they don't have much choice.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
A striking statistic that I came across yesterday is that the size of the civil service (i.e. its workforce) has apparently increased by about 25% since 2016 - i.e. during the May and Johnson premierships.
Did it say how much of that was due to onshoring functions that used to come under the various EU offices?
Although I imagine extra staffing for the pandemic was a factor as well.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
He's also one of the more right wing members of the party. If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
I don’t think it did fail. It was never able to contain the sheer scale of the pandemic, but it certainly helped. The testing mistakes at the wolverhampton site proved that. The sw saw a surge in cases as people went out thinking they were not Covid positive. There is no doubt the test and isolate part did reduce the r number. Whether Covid, with its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, was ever possible to fully track and trace in a western country is up for debate. And lastly, and this is not against you by the way, if I hear another tosser bewailing the money wasted on test, track and trace, and then say how they’ve tested twice a day for two years on ‘free’ tests, I’ll be very cross indeed. Those free test kits that people have abused and stockpiled came out of the money ‘wasted’. Rant over.
I will admit it, when it came to time outside I paid no attention whatsoever to the so-called rules of lockdown. No one was going to dictate to me when or how often I could walk in the countryside. I didn't drive to places but I did walk out my door, often for whole days at a time.
I was, in fact, covered to do so by my mental health diagnosis but that's beside the point. No one should have allowed politicians or police to tell them how much fresh air they were entitled to breath or how long they could be outside or whether they could sit on a park bench.
Especially as that fuckwit in No.10 was all the while boozing it up.
Grrrrrrr.
You obviously don't live in Derbyshire where the police were waiting all over the place to catch people travelling from their home.
I think you live somewhere in the Summary County, don't you?
Were they actually everywhere? I'm just over the border in Notts, and ours certainly were quite sensible - which is perhaps a little unusual.
If anyone is on the north shore of Lake Sevan in the next couple of days, pop into Hakobi Mot
it has a lovely view of the Caucasus foothills across the lake, you can also see the wonderful monastery on Sevan peninsula. Try the “barbecued Cig” - it’s a delicious freshwater lake fish
Cash only. Nice wine. Expect Armenian gangsters, with their blonde Russian molls, who walk three metres behind them
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
A story that reached the Mail, and Wikipedia, only recently. The timing alongside the growing concerns about Starmer being 'boring' are, I am sure, entirely coincidental.
It's been out there a while, since before he even became prominent. It was never a secret. I suspect it's increasing prominence mirrors Streeting's own.
He's talked about his background loads before, and it's a pretty interesting one, though as he pointed out, he didn't acquire it because it makes a good background for a Labour politician!
My own best case scenario is Starmer wins a small majority, implements a vanilla ice cream manifesto with a few nuggets of goodies, does it well and competently, with a bunch of common sense improvements for public services nicked from abroad. He wins a bigger majority in 2029, setting up his successors and bequeaths upon Streeting a happy and contented Labour Party to take us through the 2030s.
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
Seems to have you and your ilk chugging away furiously.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
America is doomed, part 5923
A tragedy is unfolding, in real time, and in front of our living eyes
The juxtaposition of this Republican madness in Texas, with the latest on the Texas school shooting - massively armed cops unwilling to open an unlocked door so as to save children - is beyond piquant
I have always been challenging of the need for census . Its partly that I dont like state power , partly that it is seemingly a waste of money and just done because we have always done it. Yes there are some advantages but speaking as somebody who loves family history I dont think helping that is enough. What I really object to is the trend to ask intrusive questions about religion and sexual orientation though which goes along with this obsession we have in modern society to label everything and everyone
I have never filled in a census form. Ridiculous to think that the state doesn't know I exist, still less that it doesn't already have a mass of information on me.
Excellent! We are agreed on something.
Census dodging
Still laughing at the use of 'dodging' adverb for not filling in a stupid census form.
As if the State own me.
We had all this kind of shit during lockdown. Police sticking their bloody noses into people's time outside, even tracking and fining members of the public with drones when they were just out having a walk ffs.
It's pathetic how many people trundle like sheep to the slaughter house.
Be free. Live free.
bet you are happy to benefit from the state with any subsidy going though.
I've paid sooooooooooooooooo much tax in my time Malc.
As ever, best not to attack on here without knowing much about a person's circs.
I have always been challenging of the need for census . Its partly that I dont like state power , partly that it is seemingly a waste of money and just done because we have always done it. Yes there are some advantages but speaking as somebody who loves family history I dont think helping that is enough. What I really object to is the trend to ask intrusive questions about religion and sexual orientation though which goes along with this obsession we have in modern society to label everything and everyone
I have never filled in a census form. Ridiculous to think that the state doesn't know I exist, still less that it doesn't already have a mass of information on me.
Excellent! We are agreed on something.
Census dodging
Still laughing at the use of 'dodging' adverb for not filling in a stupid census form.
As if the State own me.
We had all this kind of shit during lockdown. Police sticking their bloody noses into people's time outside, even tracking and fining members of the public with drones when they were just out having a walk ffs.
It's pathetic how many people trundle like sheep to the slaughter house.
Be free. Live free.
bet you are happy to benefit from the state with any subsidy going though.
I've paid sooooooooooooooooo much tax in my time Malc.
As ever, best not to attack on here without knowing much about a person's circs.
Hardly an attack. Mucho exaggeration me thinks you are a bit of a fibber ( different alter ego by the day) .
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
Have you never realised that there are regular elections and, indeed, referenda in Scotland? One as recently as a month or two ago.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
He's also one of the more right wing members of the party. If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
He's actually not. Yes, he opposes gun control and abortion. He also defends same-sex marriage. He's also happy to criticise Trump when needed.
PS with regard to your earlier comment, both left and right are pouring the fuel on the flames. This whole "the left are such nice people" thing is laughable.
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
Have you never realised that there are regular elections and, indeed, referenda in Scotland? One as recently as a month or two ago.
If anyone is on the north shore of Lake Sevan in the next couple of days, pop into Hakobi Mot
it has a lovely view of the Caucasus foothills across the lake, you can also see the wonderful monastery on Sevan peninsula. Try the “barbecued Cig” - it’s a delicious freshwater lake fish
Cash only. Nice wine. Expect Armenian gangsters, with their blonde Russian molls, who walk three metres behind them
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
Have you never realised that there are regular elections and, indeed, referenda in Scotland? One as recently as a month or two ago.
Slightly different machinery from an election...
Yes, it's actually a lot easier to do. Think about it. No faff with the local candidates, for a start.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
America is doomed, part 5923
A tragedy is unfolding, in real time, and in front of our living eyes
The juxtaposition of this Republican madness in Texas, with the latest on the Texas school shooting - massively armed cops unwilling to open an unlocked door so as to save children - is beyond piquant
I am two chapters in to David French's book 'Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation', which I believe ends with a discussion of how a Texas secession could happen.
It's very readable so far. And of course sobering.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
He's also one of the more right wing members of the party. If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
He's actually not. Yes, he opposes gun control and abortion. He also defends same-sex marriage. He's also happy to criticise Trump when needed.
PS with regard to your earlier comment, both left and right are pouring the fuel on the flames. This whole "the left are such nice people" thing is laughable.
Are those the only two options available? What about the extent to which each side is pouring fuel?
We have had on here, once again, this morning the stock Tory objection to paying people enough to live on. If inflation is low, pay settlements should be low - because workers do not need the extra money so asking for it is greedy. If inflation is high, pay settlements should also be low, because wage-price spiral.
Firstly, workers have already been throttled with bad wage settlements for over a decade, such that real terms pay is still lower than it was before the GFC (and I'd imagine that the situation for low paid and public sector workers is worse than average.)
Secondly, inflation is primarily the result of Covid-induced supply chain foul-ups and the different flavours of lunacy presently being practiced by the Chinese and Russian governments, not the activities of fed-up trades unionists in Bedfordshire or Fife.
Thirdly, whilst I'm sympathetic to the troubles of businesses that are struggling, the large numbers that are still doing very nicely thank you (and hosing down their executives and shareholders with money accordingly) can afford to be more generous. Ditto the Government. Profitable businesses can pay decent wage rises to their staff for a change (possibly for the first time in 15 or 20 years in many cases,) and the shareholders will just have to forego their dividends for once. Government, meanwhile, could raise a vast amount of money if it wanted just by taxing assets properly.
There are no shortage of other European countries that have even gone so far as to introduce wealth taxes without consequently degenerating into something resembling Cold War-era Albania. AIUI Sweden has chosen to impose substantial capital gains taxes on the sale of homes, whereas Norway levies an annual wealth tax; if either Oslo or Stockholm have turned into 1970s Tirana as a result then the lack of news reports revealing this is most surprising.
Finally, one also notes that the small matter of a decade of inflation busting increases in the state pension, let alone the explosive acceleration in the house price to average earnings ratio (especially for first time buyers,) are typically conspicuous by their absence from these arguments. Hefty increases in property values and pensions coupled with continual wage suppression looks suspiciously like socialism for the old and the rich, and the icy blast of the free market for everyone else. Thus wealth is redistributed from the latter to the former.
How could it possibly be that hosing down about 40% of the population with a limitless supply of money (a combination of cash recycled into asset price inflation from the QE programme, and active Government intervention) is a good thing, whereas moderately or low paid workers asking for rises of more than 1% each year is selfish and abominable and will result in chaos and collapse?
Could it, just possibly, have something to do with whom those 40% are voting for...?
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
He's also one of the more right wing members of the party. If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
He's actually not. Yes, he opposes gun control and abortion. He also defends same-sex marriage. He's also happy to criticise Trump when needed.
PS with regard to your earlier comment, both left and right are pouring the fuel on the flames. This whole "the left are such nice people" thing is laughable.
The latter was a response to a post literally about a right vs far right fight, so I don't understand your point.
As for Crenshaw, take a look at Wikipedia on his list of political positions - my description 'more', not 'most', is correct.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
Besides which, I'd like to know what the alternative to a large state is under present circumstances. We hear a lot about the tax burden being the highest it's been since the 1950s or whatever. What we don't hear is that modern Britain has a mean life expectancy about thirteen years greater than it was in 1950, and that the country is consequently rammed full of sick, disabled and very elderly people with all kinds of complex and expensive needs who would've died much sooner or not survived their conditions at all in decades past.
Add to the exploding pensions, medical and elderly care bills of the nation the need to cope with extended systemic neglect - which leaves us with police that frequently fail to investigate crimes (unless it's somebody hurting someone else's feelings on Twitter,) courts that take years to prosecute cases, armed forces with few personnel or much usable equipment left with which to defend the country, to name but a few examples - and a colossal national debt to be serviced, and it's clear that we need heaps and heaps of money.
Therefore, if you want a country that actually functions and that lives within its means rather than borrowing to spend, that means a big public sector with big taxes, as the Scandinavians have shown us. The alternative of a minimal state supposedly geared to promote growth, as seen in the USA - an ostensibly rich polity which is full of decaying infrastructure, rampant violent crime, vast income disparities and millions upon millions of people who barely survive in a condition of wretched poverty - demonstrably does not work.
The Tories are the Party of the old. No one wants more public spending than the old. No one pays less tax. Therefore...
You have a weird view of the world. You now stop paying tax unless you are in real poverty. I am a mature person and am the opposite of all 3 of your F***ed up thoughts above, not a Tory, don't want more public spending and pay a shedload in tax. Get yourself out and pay some more tax, poor pensioners got a measly 3% rise and cannot strike for a decent increase. Youth is wasted on the young.
Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to hold an ‘advisory referendum’ on Scottish independence in Autumn 2023 if the UK government refuses to grant an S30 order for an official referendum.
This will be.. fascinating
Futile and stupid. Unionists will just boycott it.
How would it even work, mechanically and financially? Non-SNP authorities, starting with the Lab-Lib-Con Edinburgh City Council, wouldn’t co-operate.
IANAE, but one assumes that the Scottish Parliament could legislate to compel them to do so? Unless Westminster decides to intervene first and amend the Scotland Act to explicitly reserve the right to hold plebiscites - although, on balance, you'd think the more productive tactic would be a Unionist boycott.
The Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020 requires Counting Officers appointed for each council area to provide sufficient polling places and reclaim costs from the Scottish Government. They could in theory hire 1500 hotel function rooms or similar places to serve as polling stations.
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
How is someone who can't organise a census that works going to succeed with an advisory referendum?
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
Have you never realised that there are regular elections and, indeed, referenda in Scotland? One as recently as a month or two ago.
Morning Carnyx, You are joking Matt could hardly pick Scotland on a map, but can sure write some pish on it.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
I don’t think it did fail. It was never able to contain the sheer scale of the pandemic, but it certainly helped. The testing mistakes at the wolverhampton site proved that. The sw saw a surge in cases as people went out thinking they were not Covid positive. There is no doubt the test and isolate part did reduce the r number. Whether Covid, with its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, was ever possible to fully track and trace in a western country is up for debate. And lastly, and this is not against you by the way, if I hear another tosser bewailing the money wasted on test, track and trace, and then say how they’ve tested twice a day for two years on ‘free’ tests, I’ll be very cross indeed. Those free test kits that people have abused and stockpiled came out of the money ‘wasted’. Rant over.
That’s why I very specifically said ‘track and trace,’ which AIUI had somehow spent the entire National school budget for a year before it even took over testing.
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
Dan Crenshaw is not only a hero but also one of the most thoughtful - and willing to debate - members of Congress. The man is an absolute legend. The people who attacked him are total c*nts.
He's also one of the more right wing members of the party. If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
He's actually not. Yes, he opposes gun control and abortion. He also defends same-sex marriage. He's also happy to criticise Trump when needed.
PS with regard to your earlier comment, both left and right are pouring the fuel on the flames. This whole "the left are such nice people" thing is laughable.
Are those the only two options available? What about the extent to which each side is pouring fuel?
No, but @Nigelb's comment was that the two sides pouring fuel were the Right and Extreme Right. He absorbed the Left from blame, which is laughable.
As to the extent to which the sides are pouring fuel, both are actually doing it equally. I deplore violence being used for political gains but I also deplore those who revel in proclaiming "shout your abortion" publicly knowing that a lot of people would be highly offended by it.
Just as the Republicans are losing suburbanites by some of their actions / claims, the Democrats are losing the Hispanic vote with their antics, hence the R win in S Texas this week. Both sides need to buck up - and, yes, equally.
If anyone is on the north shore of Lake Sevan in the next couple of days, pop into Hakobi Mot
it has a lovely view of the Caucasus foothills across the lake, you can also see the wonderful monastery on Sevan peninsula. Try the “barbecued Cig” - it’s a delicious freshwater lake fish
Cash only. Nice wine. Expect Armenian gangsters, with their blonde Russian molls, who walk three metres behind them
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
I don’t think it did fail. It was never able to contain the sheer scale of the pandemic, but it certainly helped. The testing mistakes at the wolverhampton site proved that. The sw saw a surge in cases as people went out thinking they were not Covid positive. There is no doubt the test and isolate part did reduce the r number. Whether Covid, with its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, was ever possible to fully track and trace in a western country is up for debate. And lastly, and this is not against you by the way, if I hear another tosser bewailing the money wasted on test, track and trace, and then say how they’ve tested twice a day for two years on ‘free’ tests, I’ll be very cross indeed. Those free test kits that people have abused and stockpiled came out of the money ‘wasted’. Rant over.
That’s why I very specifically said ‘track and trace,’ which AIUI had somehow spent the entire National school budget for a year before it even took over testing.
Fair enough. It’s usually conflated as the 37 billion figure.
Btw, you can get 100/1 on Lisa Nandy at Corals and Ladbrokes
The two Labour favourites to succeed Starmer are Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting but those odds were before yesterday's hideous Streeting tweets came to light.
Going into an election with that sort of vile, nasty, background would be suicidal for Labour. Streeting's goose is cooked.
And if he does ever reach Number 10, Streeting would be the first Prime Minister who has discussed violence towards journalists since [are we still allowed to say *checks notes* or is that another banned pb cliché?] Boris Johnson.
If you don't like what Boris has said about journalists in the past (and rightly so), then you should not excuse Streeting's comments.
Both are indefensible. I'd argue Streetings are worse, as (AIUI) they were made whilst he was an MP….
They weren’t. He was at the NUS at the time.
Does it make much difference that Streeting's comments about pushing Jan Moir under a train were in 2009, whilst Boris Johnson's comments about Stuart Collier were in 1990? Both were 26 at the time.
I like Wes Streeting in general. He seems to be the last sane person to leave the NUS before someone turned the lights out.
"Wes Streeting's grandfather was an armed robber who hung out with the Kray Twins and his grandmother shared a cell with the infamous Christine Keeler."
...according to the Mail at any rate.
Neither of which will do him any harm imo.
“infamous” ? Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
Aye. I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
It does still for some of us.... Though dear old Charles got very shirty when the subject was brought up here on PB. Profumo had long since expiated his sins, apparently, which included a very close arrangement with a top Russian spy, even though he was Minister of Defence at the time.... while Christine Keeler, a teenager and no better than she ought to have been, remains infamous.
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
Ducking the question, though. The opposition to the spending plans implicit in the Labour prospectus certainly wasn't "we daren't spend all that money because we might need to spend a shedload should a global pandemic comes along". It was that creating and then spending that amount of money was inherently dangerous and reckless in itself, by itself. Yet here we are....
And incidentally I believe I'm right that the level of financial support to individuals and businesses here is higher than was provided in most other countries?
why then are the worst of fcountry after all that largesse. Most went to Tory pals in cash or contracts, Tory grifters made a fortune.
The wider question of whether our spending on covid was all particuarly wise, appropriate or effective, will rise up the agenda as the immediate feeling of crisis recedes, IMO.
Eat Out To Help Out being likely to be one target.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
Some of the spending choices during the pandemic were deeply questionable. What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
Although the granddaddy of them all was track and trace. It's outrageous how much money was spent on that especially given it failed completely at every single thing it was meant to do.
I don’t think it did fail. It was never able to contain the sheer scale of the pandemic, but it certainly helped. The testing mistakes at the wolverhampton site proved that. The sw saw a surge in cases as people went out thinking they were not Covid positive. There is no doubt the test and isolate part did reduce the r number. Whether Covid, with its asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, was ever possible to fully track and trace in a western country is up for debate. And lastly, and this is not against you by the way, if I hear another tosser bewailing the money wasted on test, track and trace, and then say how they’ve tested twice a day for two years on ‘free’ tests, I’ll be very cross indeed. Those free test kits that people have abused and stockpiled came out of the money ‘wasted’. Rant over.
That’s why I very specifically said ‘track and trace,’ which AIUI had somehow spent the entire National school budget for a year before it even took over testing.
Fair enough. It’s usually conflated as the 37 billion figure.
We have had on here, once again, this morning the stock Tory objection to paying people enough to live on. If inflation is low, pay settlements should be low - because workers do not need the extra money so asking for it is greedy. If inflation is high, pay settlements should also be low, because wage-price spiral.
Firstly, workers have already been throttled with bad wage settlements for over a decade, such that real terms pay is still lower than it was before the GFC (and I'd imagine that the situation for low paid and public sector workers is worse than average.)
Secondly, inflation is primarily the result of Covid-induced supply chain foul-ups and the different flavours of lunacy presently being practiced by the Chinese and Russian governments, not the activities of fed-up trades unionists in Bedfordshire or Fife.
Thirdly, whilst I'm sympathetic to the troubles of businesses that are struggling, the large numbers that are still doing very nicely thank you (and hosing down their executives and shareholders with money accordingly) can afford to be more generous. Ditto the Government. Profitable businesses can pay decent wage rises to their staff for a change (possibly for the first time in 15 or 20 years in many cases,) and the shareholders will just have to forego their dividends for once. Government, meanwhile, could raise a vast amount of money if it wanted just by taxing assets properly.
There are no shortage of other European countries that have even gone so far as to introduce wealth taxes without consequently degenerating into something resembling Cold War-era Albania. AIUI Sweden has chosen to impose substantial capital gains taxes on the sale of homes, whereas Norway levies an annual wealth tax; if either Oslo or Stockholm have turned into 1970s Tirana as a result then the lack of news reports revealing this is most surprising.
Finally, one also notes that the small matter of a decade of inflation busting increases in the state pension, let alone the explosive acceleration in the house price to average earnings ratio (especially for first time buyers,) are typically conspicuous by their absence from these arguments. Hefty increases in property values and pensions coupled with continual wage suppression looks suspiciously like socialism for the old and the rich, and the icy blast of the free market for everyone else. Thus wealth is redistributed from the latter to the former.
How could it possibly be that hosing down about 40% of the population with a limitless supply of money (a combination of cash recycled into asset price inflation from the QE programme, and active Government intervention) is a good thing, whereas moderately or low paid workers asking for rises of more than 1% each year is selfish and abominable and will result in chaos and collapse?
Could it, just possibly, have something to do with whom those 40% are voting for...?
The people who complain about wage increases never seem to complain about dividend increases.
OT patriotic sports followers should note that plucky golfer Matt Fitzpatrick is joint-leader after three rounds in the US Open. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/61854802
We have had on here, once again, this morning the stock Tory objection to paying people enough to live on. If inflation is low, pay settlements should be low - because workers do not need the extra money so asking for it is greedy. If inflation is high, pay settlements should also be low, because wage-price spiral.
Firstly, workers have already been throttled with bad wage settlements for over a decade, such that real terms pay is still lower than it was before the GFC (and I'd imagine that the situation for low paid and public sector workers is worse than average.)
Secondly, inflation is primarily the result of Covid-induced supply chain foul-ups and the different flavours of lunacy presently being practiced by the Chinese and Russian governments, not the activities of fed-up trades unionists in Bedfordshire or Fife.
Thirdly, whilst I'm sympathetic to the troubles of businesses that are struggling, the large numbers that are still doing very nicely thank you (and hosing down their executives and shareholders with money accordingly) can afford to be more generous. Ditto the Government. Profitable businesses can pay decent wage rises to their staff for a change (possibly for the first time in 15 or 20 years in many cases,) and the shareholders will just have to forego their dividends for once. Government, meanwhile, could raise a vast amount of money if it wanted just by taxing assets properly.
There are no shortage of other European countries that have even gone so far as to introduce wealth taxes without consequently degenerating into something resembling Cold War-era Albania. AIUI Sweden has chosen to impose substantial capital gains taxes on the sale of homes, whereas Norway levies an annual wealth tax; if either Oslo or Stockholm have turned into 1970s Tirana as a result then the lack of news reports revealing this is most surprising.
Finally, one also notes that the small matter of a decade of inflation busting increases in the state pension, let alone the explosive acceleration in the house price to average earnings ratio (especially for first time buyers,) are typically conspicuous by their absence from these arguments. Hefty increases in property values and pensions coupled with continual wage suppression looks suspiciously like socialism for the old and the rich, and the icy blast of the free market for everyone else. Thus wealth is redistributed from the latter to the former.
How could it possibly be that hosing down about 40% of the population with a limitless supply of money (a combination of cash recycled into asset price inflation from the QE programme, and active Government intervention) is a good thing, whereas moderately or low paid workers asking for rises of more than 1% each year is selfish and abominable and will result in chaos and collapse?
Could it, just possibly, have something to do with whom those 40% are voting for...?
I must have missed these claims about inflation and wages but would agree that the triple lock in particular was absurdly generous to pensioners and really, really should not come back. I think wages must try to keep up with inflation but not chase it. By that I mean that wage increases must recognise the increasing costs but a headline, brief peak is not a target. If it is then the risk is that inflation becomes more endemic, even after the international factors wane.
What we have at the moment is a really tight labour market with little promise of this improving any time soon. This should both drive up wages and make employers think about how they use their more expensive staff more efficiently. If this drives up productivity its a win win for everyone.
If anyone is on the north shore of Lake Sevan in the next couple of days, pop into Hakobi Mot
it has a lovely view of the Caucasus foothills across the lake, you can also see the wonderful monastery on Sevan peninsula. Try the “barbecued Cig” - it’s a delicious freshwater lake fish
Cash only. Nice wine. Expect Armenian gangsters, with their blonde Russian molls, who walk three metres behind them
..nowhere was the Trump defeat more warmly welcomed than among supporters of Sir Keir Starmer, the polar opposite of a populist. His people interpreted the 2020 American election as a turn in the global political tide away from the cheap, nasty and dangerous theatrics of nationalist demagogues towards cautious characters offering moderation, competence and a respect for integrity.
As Britain grew exhausted with the trashy pantomime of the Johnson regime, so, I was often told by supporters of the Labour leader, voters would be drawn to no-drama Starmer. The boring-is-best school received another morale boost when Olaf Scholz won Germany’s election last year to become his country’s first Social Democratic leader in 16 years. The trouble with this proposition is that its proponents have to go either abroad or back in British history more than 70 years to find an example of an uninspirational progressive leader winning power against a rightwing opponent. So a lot of Labour people are unpersuaded that it is a formula for success.
One member of the shadow cabinet recently told me that Sir Keir should be greatly commended for making Labour less repulsive to voters, including rooting out the antisemitism that poisoned the party during the Corbyn years and re-establishing Labour’s credentials on security and patriotism. But this senior frontbencher went on to say that “there is a widespread feeling in the party that Keir has done as much as he can”.
Labour needs more...emblematic ideas that make the political weather, discomfit their opponents, engage the public and offer guidance about what to expect from a Labour government. Each policy should contribute to an overarching theme about renewing Britain. That is the way to look like a credible party of power with a clear and engaging plan for the country.
The lesson of...history may be this. A charismatic leader with the capacity to generate excitement can win from the centre-left with a cautious programme, as Tony Blair demonstrated in 1997. A dramatic manifesto of social and economic change fronted by a self-effacing leader can also be a successful blend, as Attlee proved in 1945. What doesn’t work is a radical project presented by an alarming leader, as Jeremy Corbyn confirmed in 2019.
The combination of an uninspirational leader with a lacklustre prospectus doesn’t look like a promising formula either.
The prospectus, or the programme it represents, matters. Ed Miliband lost when his Edstone revealed no more than that Labour was probably, broadly speaking, in favour of motherhood and apple pie. In 2019, Labour stuffed its prospectus with every random thought that had ever crossed Seamus Milne's cortex, which created the same confusion about what Labour would actually do (since it could not do everything).
Compare with the two great campaigns of recent years. Tony Blair with the pledge card setting out half a dozen actions; Boris without an actual pledge card but with the same handful of pledges — get Brexit done, new coppers, new doctors, new hospitals.
Rawnsley is wrong. The point is not that Blair's programme was cautious but that he had one at all.
Blair didn't scare the horses of normally-Tory middle England. Not sure Starmer is there, not with the Corbyn Labour being such a recent memory of a bullet neatly dodged.
Maybe, maybe not.
As for Corbyn "neatly" dodged, just survey the carnage, blink and question yourself, did Jeremy Corbyn actually become PM? It certainly looks like it from the chaos.
If you want a thought experiment, imagine Corbyn winning in 2017, spending like there was no tomorrow - then being faced with trying to fund Covid.
THAT, my friend, would have been chaos.
Yes, but weren't you telling us in 2017 that spending as much as Corbyn would have done was inherently dangerous and chaotic in itself? Yet that is what we have now actually done.
As a Conservative, I have no problem with the state aiding private sector businesses that would have vanished long before the pandemic ended. They are now still around to help rebuild the economy and minimise the hit we would undoubtedly suffer coming out the other side. It was a one-off bit of pragmatism in the worst health event in our lives.
The public sector was supported through Covid of course without any hit at all to pay or pensions. That sector would have been massively bloated by Corbyn - and would then have required cuts to get through Covid. That would have been fun....
You do realise all these new coppers, trains and hospitals Boris promised long before Covid were all in the bloated public sector?
Besides which, I'd like to know what the alternative to a large state is under present circumstances. We hear a lot about the tax burden being the highest it's been since the 1950s or whatever. What we don't hear is that modern Britain has a mean life expectancy about thirteen years greater than it was in 1950, and that the country is consequently rammed full of sick, disabled and very elderly people with all kinds of complex and expensive needs who would've died much sooner or not survived their conditions at all in decades past.
Add to the exploding pensions, medical and elderly care bills of the nation the need to cope with extended systemic neglect - which leaves us with police that frequently fail to investigate crimes (unless it's somebody hurting someone else's feelings on Twitter,) courts that take years to prosecute cases, armed forces with few personnel or much usable equipment left with which to defend the country, to name but a few examples - and a colossal national debt to be serviced, and it's clear that we need heaps and heaps of money.
Therefore, if you want a country that actually functions and that lives within its means rather than borrowing to spend, that means a big public sector with big taxes, as the Scandinavians have shown us. The alternative of a minimal state supposedly geared to promote growth, as seen in the USA - an ostensibly rich polity which is full of decaying infrastructure, rampant violent crime, vast income disparities and millions upon millions of people who barely survive in a condition of wretched poverty - demonstrably does not work.
The Tories are the Party of the old. No one wants more public spending than the old. No one pays less tax. Therefore...
You have a weird view of the world. You now stop paying tax unless you are in real poverty. I am a mature person and am the opposite of all 3 of your F***ed up thoughts above, not a Tory, don't want more public spending and pay a shedload in tax. Get yourself out and pay some more tax, poor pensioners got a measly 3% rise and cannot strike for a decent increase. Youth is wasted on the young.
I didn't say all. In general I am spot on correct.
Hard to know. I doubt it, but then I know several things:
1. Johnson wants to stay as Prime Minister longer than Cameron managed (so six years and two months). 2. He can't get to that length without winning another General Election (July 2019 to September 2025 is the six years and two months). 3. So he needs to fight and win another General Election between now and January 2025. 4. He hates losing, and I can't imagine he'll allow himself to be defeated in a General Election as his exit, so in my mind his plan is to fight and win one more GE, then retire after September 2025.
He'd then be able to retire, rub his term length in the face of Cameron along with TWO GE wins (with a majority in each) something not achieved by any Conservative leader since Thatcher.
The state of the whole country, any constituent part of it [1], his political party, his wife and family and pretty much anything else besides himself are irrelevent to this all. So when does his best chance of winning a GE come? This October? Possibly? May 2023? May 2024? October 2024 or the last possible day of late January 2025?
[1] Although I think he'd be miffed to lose Scotland. He'd think Cameron would gloat (whether he would or not) that 'at least he didn't lose Scotland', so I think he'll try and avoid that if he can.
Comments
Add to the exploding pensions, medical and elderly care bills of the nation the need to cope with extended systemic neglect - which leaves us with police that frequently fail to investigate crimes (unless it's somebody hurting someone else's feelings on Twitter,) courts that take years to prosecute cases, armed forces with few personnel or much usable equipment left with which to defend the country, to name but a few examples - and a colossal national debt to be serviced, and it's clear that we need heaps and heaps of money.
Therefore, if you want a country that actually functions and that lives within its means rather than borrowing to spend, that means a big public sector with big taxes, as the Scandinavians have shown us. The alternative of a minimal state supposedly geared to promote growth, as seen in the USA - an ostensibly rich polity which is full of decaying infrastructure, rampant violent crime, vast income disparities and millions upon millions of people who barely survive in a condition of wretched poverty - demonstrably does not work.
Because, with due respect to the many struggles of Cyclefree's daughter, if that money had been spent on education we could have done one of two things:
1) Nightingale Schools, where temporary schools were set up staffed by people on furlough (ideally, obviously, ex-teachers) in disused office spaces, cutting class sizes in half and spacing out children much further, dramatically reducing transmission and possibly keeping schools open, certainly cutting the numbers needing isolation;
2) Provided every schoolchild with a cheap but functional laptop that could, for those on lower incomes, have been provided with access to public wireless hotspots (e.g. Openzone) making it feasible to do more education from home.
Now anyone who tells me that either option would not have been as beneficial to the country as cut price meals, I'll have what you're having.
But neither were even attempted in a meaningful way (the technology programme came very late and never actually worked).
It was interesting to hear such a view first-hand; a bit like talking to someone who is an unapologetic Nazi. You know such people exist, but never expect to meet them...
Seems a bit judgey after all these years.
What you suggest, combined with an earlier roll out of LFTs, would likely have been more effective than the enormously expensive PCR testing at limiting infection rates until vaccines were done.
A policy which already seems to have started at the margin:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/19/man-paralysed-from-neck-down-not-eligible-for-night-time-care
A system based largely on LFTs obviates any need for it.
No one wants more public spending than the old.
No one pays less tax.
Therefore...
This paragraph leaps out at me
“Tensions within the party at times got personal. Video posted online showed far-right activists physically accosting U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, calling the conservative Republican “eye-patch McCain” over his criticism of Russia. The group included self-identified Proud Boys and Alex Stein, a social media activist from North Texas. A Navy SEAL veteran, Crenshaw lost his right eye to a bomb in Afghanistan.”
Republicans. Maintaining America’s Ghastly Aspects
Driving past Lake Sevan just now I felt a fierce pang of sadness about the USA. It is self immolating, and both sides are eagerly pouring on the gasoline
https://twitter.com/PhilipWegmann/status/1538323851808997377
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells the Faith and Freedom crowd that @RepLizCheney is "the lead Stalinist" of the Jan 6th Committee…
I bet 'infamous' doesn't often precede John Profumo.
'What have you done?' cried Christine.
'You have wrecked the whole party machine!
To lie in the nude may be rude
But to lie in the House is obscene.'
Also of note in the Act:
Each Scottish public authority must take such steps as it considers appropriate to—
(a)encourage people entitled to vote in the referendum to register to vote,
(b)promote public awareness and understanding in Scotland about—
(i)registering to vote,
(ii)the manner of voting, including how and when to vote, and
(iii)any such other matter about voting in the referendum as it considers appropriate.
Although I imagine extra staffing for the pandemic was a factor as well.
If he's attacked as ideologically unsound, then it's full fat fascists only.
Although presumably this is an act of performative political masturbation.
(Morning all)
And lastly, and this is not against you by the way, if I hear another tosser bewailing the money wasted on test, track and trace, and then say how they’ve tested twice a day for two years on ‘free’ tests, I’ll be very cross indeed. Those free test kits that people have abused and stockpiled came out of the money ‘wasted’.
Rant over.
Were they actually everywhere? I'm just over the border in Notts, and ours certainly were quite sensible - which is perhaps a little unusual.
If anyone is on the north shore of Lake Sevan in the next couple of days, pop into Hakobi Mot
it has a lovely view of the Caucasus foothills across the lake, you can also see the wonderful monastery on Sevan peninsula. Try the “barbecued Cig” - it’s a delicious freshwater lake fish
Cash only. Nice wine. Expect Armenian gangsters, with their blonde Russian molls, who walk three metres behind them
https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Local-business/Hakobi-mot-Հակոբի-մոտ-623287648036079/
He's talked about his background loads before, and it's a pretty interesting one, though as he pointed out, he didn't acquire it because it makes a good background for a Labour politician!
My own best case scenario is Starmer wins a small majority, implements a vanilla ice cream manifesto with a few nuggets of goodies, does it well and competently, with a bunch of common sense improvements for public services nicked from abroad. He wins a bigger majority in 2029, setting up his successors and bequeaths upon Streeting a happy and contented Labour Party to take us through the 2030s.
A tragedy is unfolding, in real time, and in front of our living eyes
The juxtaposition of this Republican madness in Texas, with the latest on the Texas school shooting - massively armed cops unwilling to open an unlocked door so as to save children - is beyond piquant
PS with regard to your earlier comment, both left and right are pouring the fuel on the flames. This whole "the left are such nice people" thing is laughable.
(And no, what I'm trying to type/edit/cut & paste isn't too bloody long, shortening it results in the same messages.)
It's very readable so far. And of course sobering.
Firstly, workers have already been throttled with bad wage settlements for over a decade, such that real terms pay is still lower than it was before the GFC (and I'd imagine that the situation for low paid and public sector workers is worse than average.)
Secondly, inflation is primarily the result of Covid-induced supply chain foul-ups and the different flavours of lunacy presently being practiced by the Chinese and Russian governments, not the activities of fed-up trades unionists in Bedfordshire or Fife.
Thirdly, whilst I'm sympathetic to the troubles of businesses that are struggling, the large numbers that are still doing very nicely thank you (and hosing down their executives and shareholders with money accordingly) can afford to be more generous. Ditto the Government. Profitable businesses can pay decent wage rises to their staff for a change (possibly for the first time in 15 or 20 years in many cases,) and the shareholders will just have to forego their dividends for once. Government, meanwhile, could raise a vast amount of money if it wanted just by taxing assets properly.
There are no shortage of other European countries that have even gone so far as to introduce wealth taxes without consequently degenerating into something resembling Cold War-era Albania. AIUI Sweden has chosen to impose substantial capital gains taxes on the sale of homes, whereas Norway levies an annual wealth tax; if either Oslo or Stockholm have turned into 1970s Tirana as a result then the lack of news reports revealing this is most surprising.
Finally, one also notes that the small matter of a decade of inflation busting increases in the state pension, let alone the explosive acceleration in the house price to average earnings ratio (especially for first time buyers,) are typically conspicuous by their absence from these arguments. Hefty increases in property values and pensions coupled with continual wage suppression looks suspiciously like socialism for the old and the rich, and the icy blast of the free market for everyone else. Thus wealth is redistributed from the latter to the former.
How could it possibly be that hosing down about 40% of the population with a limitless supply of money (a combination of cash recycled into asset price inflation from the QE programme, and active Government intervention) is a good thing, whereas moderately or low paid workers asking for rises of more than 1% each year is selfish and abominable and will result in chaos and collapse?
Could it, just possibly, have something to do with whom those 40% are voting for...?
As for Crenshaw, take a look at Wikipedia on his list of political positions - my description 'more', not 'most', is correct.
Get yourself out and pay some more tax, poor pensioners got a measly 3% rise and cannot strike for a decent increase. Youth is wasted on the young.
Edit - yes, you have.
As to the extent to which the sides are pouring fuel, both are actually doing it equally. I deplore violence being used for political gains but I also deplore those who revel in proclaiming "shout your abortion" publicly knowing that a lot of people would be highly offended by it.
Just as the Republicans are losing suburbanites by some of their actions / claims, the Democrats are losing the Hispanic vote with their antics, hence the R win in S Texas this week. Both sides need to buck up - and, yes, equally.
Strange old world, innit?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-lessons-learned-to-date-report-government-response/the-governments-response-to-the-health-and-social-care-committee-and-science-and-technology-committee-joint-report-coronavirus-lessons-learned-to-d
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/61854802
NEW THREAD
What we have at the moment is a really tight labour market with little promise of this improving any time soon. This should both drive up wages and make employers think about how they use their more expensive staff more efficiently. If this drives up productivity its a win win for everyone.
In general I am spot on correct.
Hard to know. I doubt it, but then I know several things:
1. Johnson wants to stay as Prime Minister longer than Cameron managed (so six years and two months).
2. He can't get to that length without winning another General Election (July 2019 to September 2025 is the six years and two months).
3. So he needs to fight and win another General Election between now and January 2025.
4. He hates losing, and I can't imagine he'll allow himself to be defeated in a General Election as his exit, so in my mind his plan is to fight and win one more GE, then retire after September 2025.
He'd then be able to retire, rub his term length in the face of Cameron along with TWO GE wins (with a majority in each) something not achieved by any Conservative leader since Thatcher.
The state of the whole country, any constituent part of it [1], his political party, his wife and family and pretty much anything else besides himself are irrelevent to this all.
So when does his best chance of winning a GE come? This October? Possibly? May 2023? May 2024? October 2024 or the last possible day of late January 2025?
[1] Although I think he'd be miffed to lose Scotland. He'd think Cameron would gloat (whether he would or not) that 'at least he didn't lose Scotland', so I think he'll try and avoid that if he can.