Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
This week's bot was almost impressive. Ranting about woke in schools. How democracy is failing. How strong leadership is needed.
We sure he is a Russian bot? And not one of the NatC speakers? TBH I look at some of the GBeebies people on Twitter and they don't sound much different.
This was one of Mayfair's comments:
"We can avoid recession if we admit 1 million immigrants next year."
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Your posts are binary, completely wrong or completely right. Fascinating.
Long and lurid thread on the American healthcare racket. Literally a racket involving industrial production of fake medicines, false accounting, murder, endemic fraud and widespread killing of patients.
US healthcare is the one comparison which makes the NHS look brilliant.
US healthcare is in the UK lobby system, showing politicians the lolly and explaining they can help the crumbling and expensive UK socialised healthcare out, help bring it into the 21st century. The NHS will be replaced by the US system at some point for sure.
Running down, the unsustainable in its present form, NHS makes perfect sense if you have friends of influence in US life science and big pharma organisations.
This Chomskyite trope about "running down" services as a prelude to privatisation makes no sense.
It makes perfect sense if you believe privatisation, rather than good delivery, is the goal.
Only if you are susceptible to tenuous conspiracy theories dreamt up by loony academics.
The opposite would make much more sense as a conspiracy: flooding the NHS with public investment before selling it off on the cheap.
It's not a tenuous conspiracy theory to believe that some politicians are driven more by ideological purity and less by practical considerations or effective outcomes. You know they exist in all walks of politics.
Proving the case is rather more difficult, but the theory is much more coherent than you give credit for.
The theory depends on the idea that someone who wants to privatise the NHS needs to "manufacture consent" so they deliverately set about making the service as bad as possible, regardless of its effect on their electability. It's on a par with Chomsky's more recent thoughts on Ukraine.
The only practical effect of the theory is to make people think irrationally about government spending decisions.
Noooooo. I have read through these exchanges, and all of you on both sides have this completely utterly wrong. You are all thinking in terms of idea’s, political beliefs, that this is a battle of ideology. STOP IT - it’s nothing of the sort. It’s politics but only in the sense power is wealth, wealth is power. The US healthcare system is what it is because of money in the lobby. UK healthcare will change to be like the US because of money in the lobby.
Did I not say that "flooding the NHS with public investment before selling it off on the cheap" makes more sense as a conspiracy theory? US Big Medicine Inc would much rather take over a shiny new hospital paid for by the UK taxpayer.
So the Tory pledge to quickly build 40 of those was sinister then?
More dexter than sinister.
Maybe more random bluster than part of any deliverable plan.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
@mrjamesob The speed with which they’ve gone from telling us that we lost & should get over it to claiming that we somehow won & have secretly been in charge all along is something to behold. However nuts it gets, I guess it will always be easier than admitting they got everything g wrong.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
For the sake of my blood pressure and general mental well-being, I sadly won’t be reading what sounds like a good book - Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell’s account of Johnson’s premiership ‘Johnson at 10’. Simply reading the review has got my hackles up:
‘Boris Johnson has been accused of many, many things over the years. But the parties and the lies, the sleaze and the juicier scandals don’t seem to interest historians Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell much. Their central complaint in this utterly scathing account of his time at No 10 is the more fundamental one that, as they put it, he “never understood how to be prime minister, nor how to govern”; that he didn’t know what he was doing, barely bothered learning, and was so lacking in moral seriousness that even when he tried he couldn’t transcend the limitations of his “base self”…
‘The story really begins with Johnson’s response to his side winning the Brexit referendum: far from celebrating, they write, he paced the house looking “ashen-faced and distraught”, panicking aloud that: “Oh shit, we’ve got no plan. We haven’t thought about it. I didn’t think it would happen.” What weighed most heavily in his choosing leave over remain, they suggest, was his own personal ambition…
‘The book describes a prime minister alarmingly unable to focus and seemingly out of his depth, who Cummings felt should be kept out of Brexit negotiations because “he didn’t understand them”. He promoted mediocre ministers who didn’t threaten him, played rival aides off against each other, and showed shockingly little interest in major issues such as education; privately agnostic about the divisive “war on woke”, he nonetheless let his government wage it vigorously. Even those closest to him struggled to discern his real opinions…
‘The case for Johnson’s defence is usually that he got Brexit done, rolled out a Covid vaccine and stood with Ukraine. But Seldon and Newell argue that Brexit hasn’t delivered as promised, that the real vaccine heroes were the chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and NHS executive Dr Emily Lawson, with the European Commission president more influential on Ukraine…
‘… it refutes the dangerous myth that Boris Johnson was foiled by a remainer establishment, rather than his own incompetence. His former chief of staff Eddie Lister declares that there is “no evidence that the civil service impeded the delivery of Brexit” and the authors conclude that if Johnson didn’t always get what he wanted from Whitehall, that’s because he led it poorly…’
Brexit - no plan; a poor idea badly botched by a chancer charlatan. We continue to live with the baleful consequences. It’s not surprising he and Gove were ashen faced at the the presser the day after the referendum, they knew their jolly wheeze had exploded in their faces.
I've read the book, it confirmed what I said long before Boris Johnson became PM.
He is fundamentally too lazy to be PM, he just wants the glory but none of the hard work.
Any reason you can think of why the covid enquiry can’t have his unredacted whatsapp messaging?
It depends how enthusiastic team Johnson are with the Sharpie. More Sharpie than text leaves documents meaningless.
The head of the inquiry can demand the documents unredacted - and should. If there are national security concerns, (1) why was Johnson using WhatsApp for the messages in the first place, and (2) she could engage, for example, a very senior retired security official to assess the question.
Correct me where I am wrong, the head of enquiry is demanding it, and government are saying no. Suggests something to hide that doesn’t just hurt Boris but the current PM.
Can there be much that is actually security sensitive in covid WhatsApp? It has to be redaction merely to save embarrassment to top politicians. In which case it’s saying an enquiry to get to level of truth to learn the right lessons might as well disband right now and not waste anymore time or money, as it cannot achieve that objective.
They went for the gold trim thinking they’d be champions this season but they choked.
Arsenal’s choking was almost Spursy this year.
All went wrong after Granit Xhaka roused the Anfield crowd.
Stupid boy.
To be honest and balanced in assessment, you are right the Anfield game looks like a turning point for Arsenal, not just two nil up, but played very well and totally dominated that stage of the game. To not go on and win from there must have hit momentum and self belief. It was a similar story a week later at West Ham.
Nerves are part of it. I remember an interview with Alan Hansen when he said he hated the pressure of the run ins - personally he couldn’t sleep at night, used to try for a few more hours in the afternoon, and that the dressing room on match days was sick with nerves. Once results are wobbling those nerves and how it affects performance are only going to be worse.
Truth is Arsenal wobbled, trying to replace Saliba with Holding was laughable, but not just injuries the form of Partey and Xachka went off a cliff, and Saka looks out on his feet. As Man City players are flying after a season of rotation, Saka has not been rotated or looked after at all and it shows.
This is because the Arsenal squad are just not strong enough to match Man City’s 42 points from 46 run in. No one’s is.
The positive for Arsenal is not just 2nd and CL football, but their record against top 8 sides was pretty good, 4 off Newcastle, 4 off Liverpool, 6 off Tottenham, 3 of Man U and Brighton, 6 off villa. That’s the best guide of the progress they made this season.
It wasn't the Anfield game imo that was the problem, That was a good point. It was the next 2. The West Ham and Southampton games. And yes they choked a bit but it was more a case of City winning the title than Arsenal throwing it away. City were a juggernaut at the end.
It was still a great season for the Arse. 2nd by miles and CL football next year. They overperformed. Next season I expect them to fall back and be battling in that 4th to 7th space rather than challenging for the title. If the bookies disagree with me on this I'm planning a big sell.
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Your posts are binary, completely wrong or completely right. Fascinating.
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Wasn't there a fridge in which he could have hidden?
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
Not helped by rising inflation in the US with higher rates there on the cards
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
The financial maelstrom that hit UK assets after the mini-budget of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng last year was attributed caustically to investors hitting Britain with a “moron premium”.
The term originated among financial commentators online to explain why gilts were being sold off at the same time as the pound, a dynamic usually associated with poorer emerging markets during a currency crisis.
This week sterling and gilts marched in step once again as bond prices fell sharply and the currency weakened. However, rather than fears over irresponsible tax cuts from an iconoclastic government, the market volatility was triggered by concern that Britain’s stubborn inflation would not be quickly vanquished. “The morons are no longer in the government but at the Bank of England,” one market insider said.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
They went for the gold trim thinking they’d be champions this season but they choked.
Arsenal’s choking was almost Spursy this year.
All went wrong after Granit Xhaka roused the Anfield crowd.
Stupid boy.
To be honest and balanced in assessment, you are right the Anfield game looks like a turning point for Arsenal, not just two nil up, but played very well and totally dominated that stage of the game. To not go on and win from there must have hit momentum and self belief. It was a similar story a week later at West Ham.
Nerves are part of it. I remember an interview with Alan Hansen when he said he hated the pressure of the run ins - personally he couldn’t sleep at night, used to try for a few more hours in the afternoon, and that the dressing room on match days was sick with nerves. Once results are wobbling those nerves and how it affects performance are only going to be worse.
Truth is Arsenal wobbled, trying to replace Saliba with Holding was laughable, but not just injuries the form of Partey and Xachka went off a cliff, and Saka looks out on his feet. As Man City players are flying after a season of rotation, Saka has not been rotated or looked after at all and it shows.
This is because the Arsenal squad are just not strong enough to match Man City’s 42 points from 46 run in. No one’s is.
The positive for Arsenal is not just 2nd and CL football, but their record against top 8 sides was pretty good, 4 off Newcastle, 4 off Liverpool, 6 off Tottenham, 3 of Man U and Brighton, 6 off villa. That’s the best guide of the progress they made this season.
It wasn't the Anfield game imo that was the problem, That was a good point. It was the next 2. The West Ham and Southampton games. And yes they choked a bit but it was more a case of City winning the title than Arsenal throwing it away. City were a juggernaut at the end.
It was still a great season for the Arse. 2nd by miles and CL football next year. They overperformed. Next season I expect them to fall back and be battling in that 4th to 7th space rather than challenging for the title. If the bookies disagree with me on this I'm planning a big sell.
Arsenal are second at present by 9 points or 3 wins from Manchester United which is much closer than I expected
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
@mrjamesob The speed with which they’ve gone from telling us that we lost & should get over it to claiming that we somehow won & have secretly been in charge all along is something to behold. However nuts it gets, I guess it will always be easier than admitting they got everything g wrong.
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
I like the way you add "now banned". I wonder why a country that has been invaded might ban political parties that favour the invader. How dare they!
Russia has been interfering in Ukraine ever since the breakup. People who favour Russian TV channels and media would be getting a very different view of reality from those in western Ukraine. Sadly, they have now learnt the reality of Russian stronk - that it means death and destruction; that the Russians see them as lesser, and as cannon fodder.
The equivalence between voting for a pro-Russian party and wanting Russia to annex the country is also a very generous interpretation of intent. Same interpretation the Russians have started making of voters for Georgian Dream in another of their old colonies.
It’s the same logic that had all remainers wanting to subsume Britain into a European superstate, or would imply anyone voting for historically Britain-friendly Fine Gael would welcome the redcoats parachuting into Dublin airport. Or voters for any Quebecois nationalist party want the French navy to mount an amphibious landing on Montreal.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
These fuckers are going to be like the Japanese at Okinawa 1945 when the UK rejoins the EU.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
“Dolchstoßbellends”. New term for crusaders against the woke blob coup.
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
These fuckers are going to be like the Japanese at Okinawa 1945 when the UK rejoins the EU.
I quite like the idea of them doing a Banzai charge into a hail of bullets, but these people are much more likely to send out women and kids with a couple of grenades concealed about their person.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
How is it any different from a Littlejohn column c. 2000?
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
I like the way you add "now banned". I wonder why a country that has been invaded might ban political parties that favour the invader. How dare they!
Russia has been interfering in Ukraine ever since the breakup. People who favour Russian TV channels and media would be getting a very different view of reality from those in western Ukraine. Sadly, they have now learnt the reality of Russian stronk - that it means death and destruction; that the Russians see them as lesser, and as cannon fodder.
The equivalence between voting for a pro-Russian party and wanting Russia to annex the country is also a very generous interpretation of intent. Same interpretation the Russians have started making of voters for Georgian Dream in another of their old colonies.
I never made that equivalence. I wrote that voting for the Party of the Regions, Nashi, etc. would be guide to the prevalence of Russian identity. I never said that those voters wanted the VSRF to pour over the border.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
What else can they do, though? The practical alternatives are to fess up, at least at the level of "it was a worthwhile punt that didn't happen to win" or just stop talking. Both of those are open to individual voters, but not to opinion formers who have spent a couple of decades saying that Brexit would be just the ticket.
Littlejohnthomas (I think I nicked that from Chris Morris) has to keep saying that Brexit is a good idea. So if people see it going badly, who else can he blame?
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
The financial maelstrom that hit UK assets after the mini-budget of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng last year was attributed caustically to investors hitting Britain with a “moron premium”.
The term originated among financial commentators online to explain why gilts were being sold off at the same time as the pound, a dynamic usually associated with poorer emerging markets during a currency crisis.
This week sterling and gilts marched in step once again as bond prices fell sharply and the currency weakened. However, rather than fears over irresponsible tax cuts from an iconoclastic government, the market volatility was triggered by concern that Britain’s stubborn inflation would not be quickly vanquished. “The morons are no longer in the government but at the Bank of England,” one market insider said.
Rubbish. The market insider is talking rubbish if thinking the responsibility for return to Truss level gilt simply in BoE, but the rest of the times article could have been copied from PB posts so hardly revelatory news.
My reasoning. The markets saying we don’t believe your talk you are on top of your inflation problem. The Bank of England have an inflation target and responsibility for achieving it, but governments with one hand throwing out such generous money - not free money it comes from our high taxes and high borrowing we must repay back, with interest, but government certainly been generous spraying it out there - and doing zilch about price gouging with the other hand, has a far greater over heating affect than anything BoE done wrong.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
Mortgage lending is ultra competitive at the moment. Borrowers won't realise this, only seeing the headline rate go up. But there's a lot of cash looking for people to take out mortgages. That will be a consideration for the BoE.
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
True but aren't we as the West supposed to be better than the Russians? Shouldn't we be treating the general Russian speaking population in Ukraine better than the Russians were treating the Ukrainians? As in all these cases it will be a small minority in positions of power who will have done the oppressing and to blame the 'man in the field' seems illogical.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Your posts are binary, completely wrong or completely right. Fascinating.
Nothing binary about me HorseBat.
Nothing wrong about my posts either. Just ahead of the game.
Have you thought that my understanding of economic and political history through books and internet, is going to be much stronger than those of you who actually lived through the period, and were there at the time? We should expect two different views of the same thing to form - from a balanced, nuanced, expert explanation of what happened coming from detachment versus a bias view polluted by self interest from lived experience. I have strong sociological science on my side.
For example, look to your own Labour Party and the abysmal week they have had too. Yes they have had an abysmal week.
Political history facts here. When Labour came to power in 1974 it was with pledges and intent to spend money, their policy was for growth and spending proceeds of growth, and they started this straightaway in the two years under Wilson. But the number 1 problem to be tackled was that economy was already hot from going for growth and running toward overheating, so in the first two years of that government Labour ignorantly set up all the problems of the following three.
Fortunately the ignorance of that Labour government ushered in the brilliant Thatcher era, a government of aspiration on the side of everyone, curing the sick man of Europe with lots of economic sanity that is tackling the number 1 thing to tackle in the most effective way REGARDLESS of your manifesto tax cutting promises.
Right now today we have exactly the same situation. Using a mixture of BoE monetary tightening through interest rates and Jeremy Hunt withdrawing government handouts to households and businesses and government saying no to public sector strikers, the number one thing to tackle is being tackled. To actually avoid recession, to narrowly, technically avoid a technical recession, but fail to stop the inflation, that would be the failure position - though some daft posters to PB have been hailing that failure as success all week. Clueless idiots who try to impress us by saying I’ve worked in the city last 20 years so know what I am talking about, here are the basics you need to learn. Wtf 🤷♀️
If Labour don’t back what Sunak and Hunt are doing, the pain for gain Tories intend to inflict, then Labour will be on course to repeat the mistakes of both 74-76 and 1992 at the same time.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
How is it any different from a Littlejohn column c. 2000?
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
UK households and businesses suffered more than other countries due to our reliance of gas imports, it’s still there in our inflation.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
How is it any different from a Littlejohn column c. 2000?
Per wiki he "writes a twice-weekly column for the Daily Mail about British affairs as observed from reading the news at home in Florida."
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Wasn't there a fridge in which he could have hidden?
From his own family at the get together work meetings at chequers?
Wait. Now does this explain all frg entries in the diary?
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
True but aren't we as the West supposed to be better than the Russians? Shouldn't we be treating the general Russian speaking population in Ukraine better than the Russians were treating the Ukrainians? As in all these cases it will be a small minority in positions of power who will have done the oppressing and to blame the 'man in the field' seems illogical.
People on political websites in nice, safe countries will not be treating people one way or another.
I suspect the decision will be taken by those on the ground.
And they might note that Czechia doesn't have a Sudeten German problem or Poland a Silesian German problem or Turkey an Ionian Greek problem anymore.
Or for a more recent situation what happened to the ethnic Serbs of Croatia.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Who believes this drivel ?
Enough people to support the business model of at least three newspapers and a TV channel
It's that 15% again. A minority but a big one. Trump fans. Like a bit of Boris. No Dealers. Country is Full. Charity begins at Home. We Stand Alone and Proud. Same people. Millions of them.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Who believes this drivel ?
Enough people to support the business model of at least three newspapers and a TV channel
The fact that Suella Braverman is still in office, and using that office as an platform to spit her venom at various sections of the population, with no regard to the harm she does, but only a regard to her own rather ludicrous political ambitions, is a rather strong antidote to the paranoid fantasy that an "ultra-woke" coup is taking place.
If anything, on the contrary, it demonstrates that under this Tory government, common decency has lost its voice. We're left with the scrapings of the barrel - a bunch of unscrupulous, mediocre, tenth-rate rabble rousers, with a prime minister torn between compliance and impotence.
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Your posts are binary, completely wrong or completely right. Fascinating.
Nothing binary about me HorseBat.
Nothing wrong about my posts either. Just ahead of the game.
Have you thought that my understanding of economic and political history through books and internet, is going to be much stronger than those of you who actually lived through the period, and were there at the time? We should expect two different views of the same thing to form - from a balanced, nuanced, expert explanation of what happened coming from detachment versus a bias view polluted by self interest from lived experience. I have strong sociological science on my side.
For example, look to your own Labour Party and the abysmal week they have had too. Yes they have had an abysmal week.
Political history facts here. When Labour came to power in 1974 it was with pledges and intent to spend money, their policy was for growth and spending proceeds of growth, and they started this straightaway in the two years under Wilson. But the number 1 problem to be tackled was that economy was already hot from going for growth and running toward overheating, so in the first two years of that government Labour ignorantly set up all the problems of the following three.
Fortunately the ignorance of that Labour government ushered in the brilliant Thatcher era, a government of aspiration on the side of everyone, curing the sick man of Europe with lots of economic sanity that is tackling the number 1 thing to tackle in the most effective way REGARDLESS of your manifesto tax cutting promises.
Right now today we have exactly the same situation. Using a mixture of BoE monetary tightening through interest rates and Jeremy Hunt withdrawing government handouts to households and businesses and government saying no to public sector strikers, the number one thing to tackle is being tackled. To actually avoid recession, to narrowly, technically avoid a technical recession, but fail to stop the inflation, that would be the failure position - though some daft posters to PB have been hailing that failure as success all week. Clueless idiots who try to impress us by saying I’ve worked in the city last 20 years so know what I am talking about, here are the basics you need to learn. Wtf 🤷♀️
If Labour don’t back what Sunak and Hunt are doing, the pain for gain Tories intend to inflict, then Labour will be on course to repeat the mistakes of both 74-76 and 1992 at the same time.
Would you care to list some of the economic benefits from being in recession, and the mechanisms by which those benefits manifest? So far all you've said is that they 'flush the inflation out of the system' like you're some 18th century quack recommending another bout of blood-letting. It's pseudo-economics.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Who believes this drivel ?
Enough people to support the business model of at least three newspapers and a TV channel
The fact that Suella Braverman is still in office, and using that office as an platform to spit her venom at various sections of the population, with no regard to the harm she does, but only a regard to her own rather ludicrous political ambitions, is a rather strong antidote to the paranoid fantasy that an "ultra-woke" coup is taking place.
If anything, on the contrary, it demonstrates that under this Tory government, common decency has lost its voice. We're left with the scrapings of the barrel - a bunch of unscrupulous, mediocre, tenth-rate rabble rousers, with a prime minister torn between compliance and impotence.
Sunak is a strange beast. Norman Tebbit reincarnated as an Asian citizen-of-nowhere hedge fund billionaire.
Opinium tonight. Tories leaped in the last one, correction from the bad sample before. Tories have enjoyed lots of strong polling the last few days. I’ll go with Tories up to 30, Labour on 42.
Have to go now, GF has gone out to the landing dressed as a plumber, and wants me to answer the door. 🪠
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
As TimS points out below, there's a big stretch between voting for a party that wants closer links with Russia, and claiming that vote in some way validates Russia's evil actions.
"A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda "
The time for that would have been pre-2014, before Russia's actions caused massive population movements within Ukraine. And how do you count the votes of the thousands of people Russia's actions have killed? And do you include the thousands Russia has moved in as part of their population resettlements? A referenda is totally unworkabe, as you well know. You want to reward fascism.
Since there is no way a valid referenda can now be held, Russia can just f*** off.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Journalists chasing Johnson round some airport is highly amusing. His reality distortion field is clearly failing.
He sounded quite angry (with just a soupçon of fear) which was fukking excellent.
It’s a non story because he didn’t actually add anything, just called it a nonsense a couple of times. I have some sympathy for Boris on this one, from office diary entries alone you can’t know what was socially distanced or not, asking authorities to investigate has to be bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall or having inside knowledge of the events, so a blatant stitch up at a sensitive time of enquiry forming judgement.
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
Your posts are binary, completely wrong or completely right. Fascinating.
Nothing binary about me HorseBat.
Nothing wrong about my posts either. Just ahead of the game.
Have you thought that my understanding of economic and political history through books and internet, is going to be much stronger than those of you who actually lived through the period, and were there at the time? We should expect two different views of the same thing to form - from a balanced, nuanced, expert explanation of what happened coming from detachment versus a bias view polluted by self interest from lived experience. I have strong sociological science on my side.
For example, look to your own Labour Party and the abysmal week they have had too. Yes they have had an abysmal week.
Political history facts here. When Labour came to power in 1974 it was with pledges and intent to spend money, their policy was for growth and spending proceeds of growth, and they started this straightaway in the two years under Wilson. But the number 1 problem to be tackled was that economy was already hot from going for growth and running toward overheating, so in the first two years of that government Labour ignorantly set up all the problems of the following three.
Fortunately the ignorance of that Labour government ushered in the brilliant Thatcher era, a government of aspiration on the side of everyone, curing the sick man of Europe with lots of economic sanity that is tackling the number 1 thing to tackle in the most effective way REGARDLESS of your manifesto tax cutting promises.
Right now today we have exactly the same situation. Using a mixture of BoE monetary tightening through interest rates and Jeremy Hunt withdrawing government handouts to households and businesses and government saying no to public sector strikers, the number one thing to tackle is being tackled. To actually avoid recession, to narrowly, technically avoid a technical recession, but fail to stop the inflation, that would be the failure position - though some daft posters to PB have been hailing that failure as success all week. Clueless idiots who try to impress us by saying I’ve worked in the city last 20 years so know what I am talking about, here are the basics you need to learn. Wtf 🤷♀️
If Labour don’t back what Sunak and Hunt are doing, the pain for gain Tories intend to inflict, then Labour will be on course to repeat the mistakes of both 74-76 and 1992 at the same time.
Would you care to list some of the economic benefits from being in recession, and the mechanisms by which those benefits manifest? So far all you've said is that they 'flush the inflation out of the system' like you're some 18th century quack recommending another bout of blood-letting. It's pseudo-economics.
Simples.
1. Flush inflation out the system. 2. Kills off Greedinflation at same time. 3. Allows sustainable growth without overheating economy losing confidence of the markets and crashing the economy.
Evidence for this - learning lesson from Labour 1974-79.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
Framing it as an inter-ethnic rivalry completely misses the point. This is not Northern Ireland.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
This week's bot was almost impressive. Ranting about woke in schools. How democracy is failing. How strong leadership is needed.
We sure he is a Russian bot? And not one of the NatC speakers? TBH I look at some of the GBeebies people on Twitter and they don't sound much different.
I took as much gay propaganda and perversion I could to school, but the teachers didn’t like it at all. Not one bit. I like to think this has changed in just a dozen years, but strongly suspect the Nat-C’s and GBeebies are completely wrong on this. What a load of hopeful rubbish SovBot’s spout. 👭
Colonel "Bat" Guano: I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
Yes, it can't be pointed out often enough that language <> nationality. There are plenty of Russian speaking Ukrainians who don't feel in the least bit Russian. There are also Russian speaking Ukrainians who do consider themselves Russian, but my understanding is that these are mainly in Crimea.
I say this only for information, and not to advance any particular solution.
Being a native Russian speaker doesn't necessarily mean a Russian identity (though it often does). After all, Zelly himself is a native Russian speaker who affects a spectacularly mangled version of Ukrainian.
There are plenty of people in the Southern and Eastern oblasts (and Kiev) who both speak Russian and identify as Russian. I wouldn't like to guess at the proportion though electoral support for pro Russian parties like the (now banned) Party of the Regions would be a rough guide. They are known as 'zhdaniy'. Literally, "The Ones Who Wait"; the implication being that they are waiting for the RF to arrive.
They were heavily concentrated in the east of the country, with over 50% of the vote in the eastern provinces and under 5% in the far west like Lviv (see https://tinyurl.com/forlife1 ). We are seeing Ukrainian soldiers in the current frontline complaining that the locals are pro-Russian (though that's partly many pro-Ukrainian residents may well have fled when rthe invasion started), which certainly wasn't the case when it looked as though Russia might conquer the whole country.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
Frankly I have very little sympathy for this. Ukraine has had a functioning democracy since 1991. Where was the separatism problem before Russia invaded? The only serious 'oppression' people seem able to point to is the lack of official status for the Russian language. If these people want to know about real oppression they should probably go and live in Russia itself.
We should remember that the Party of Regions President Yanukyovich only got elected on the basis of doing an agreement with the EU which of course he reneged on. Over 80% of both Donbass regions voted to leave the Soviet Union. Crimea I would accept is trickier. I have no more sympathy for the increasingly geriatric types in Eastern Ukraine who want the Soviet Union back as I do for whites in South Africa wanting the return of the British Empire. If they are so keen on being Russian they should go and live there.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
And does Ukraine get a choice in this matter ?
They might feel to accept the second part of your sentence would mean that they had been defeated.
And should Russia have to secede any territory to achieve your brave new world ?
Ethnic Ukrainian villages on the Russian side of the border ?
Kaliningrad - surely a strategic threat to Poland and the Baltic countries ?
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
There is some merit in the argument, over-simplified as it is of course, that the relative outperformance of the US and German economies in last decade was down to their cheaper energy. US from its vast domestic fracked gas and oil output, Germany from its Russian gas and coal imports.
May also give a hint as to why France has done economically relatively well since the invasion, with its once much more expensive but now comparatively price-competitive nuclear power.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
And does Ukraine get a choice in this matter ?
Not really. They are completely dependent on US money and weapons so piper, tunes, etc.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
To be honest I think that's a rather condescending view of national sovereignty - and democracy too, for that matter.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
IMV this is one of the major reasons so few countries have accepted Russia's blatant annexation of regions of Ukraine - including areas they do not hold. Countries that might quite like the idea of being able to grab parts of neighbouring countries are well aware the same thing could happen to them. All a neighbour needs to do is spend a few years fomenting trouble amongst a minority in a country, then claim they're entering to protect that minority. Then that becomes annexation - to protect the minroity.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
Germany's gas was at market rates, they didn't get a discount. That being said, because the gas was piped, and didn't have to come (relatively) far, they will have saved on transport costs.
It's also important to note that countries don't buy gas: German power and industrial companies entered into purchase agreements with Russian and Norwegian energy companies. Some will have been on long-term fixed price contracts, but most were based on benchmark natural gas prices (sometimes with an oil price kicker.)
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
There is some merit in the argument, over-simplified as it is of course, that the relative outperformance of the US and German economies in last decade was down to their cheaper energy.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
We do have these difficult problems all over the world, where identities don’t overlap with national borders. In peacetime there are ways to deal with them. War makes everything twice as hard.
Particularly difficult when a minority population is a legacy of former empire. It took me a while to clock that’s how the former Ottoman Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians were seen by the Serbs. Obviously the case too in Zimbabwe and S Africa, the pieds noirs in Algeria, the Ulster Scots, and no doubt many more.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
This is exactly why anyone genuinely interested in peace should want a full Ukrainian victory. The precedent set by a Russian victory (even a partial one) would be disastrous for peace, as malign countries will know they can just grab territory - and if they don't get it all, they can try again in a few years.
Which is also why Corbyn et al are not genuinely interested in peace.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
And does Ukraine get a choice in this matter ?
Not really. They are completely dependent on US money and weapons so piper, tunes, etc.
To be fair, Russia's given Ukraine a fair amount of equipment as well. I look forward to that largesse increasing in the next few weeks.
If you look at the programme of Opposition Platform - For Life it is NOT about joining Russia or ceceding from Ukraine. It does however favour Donbass autonomy. Where is the evidence for a substantial minority let alone a majority of people in any part of Ukraine wanting to be part of Russia?
It was unplugged for a few minutes so someone could use a vacuum. It’s currently rebooting.
I wish that was funny.
Until a few years ago one of the key immigration systems did run from an office building next to the runways at Heathrow and it was major project to move it into a real data centre.
In slightly related matters, there might be a peace deal in the offing over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, perhaps stopping the on-off Azerbaijan/Armenian conflicts.
It looks like the deal will heavily favour Azerbaijan, as Armenia is not receiving much help from its usual helper Russia. This has upset Armenia so much that they may be leaving Russia's version of NATO, the CTSO.
In turn, this news *may* have a small effect on the Turkish presidential election second round, as Azerbaijan receives massive aid from Turkey.
If you look at the programme of Opposition Platform - For Life it is NOT about joining Russia or ceceding from Ukraine. It does however favour Donbass autonomy. Where is the evidence for a substantial minority let alone a majority of people in any part of Ukraine wanting to be part of Russia?
I am so so glad I am on a five year fixed signed just before Truss but God I am terrified about when it comes to an end
I signed a 2-year fix in Nov 2021 at 0.89% - not taking the five year was possibly the worst decision I've made in my entire life.
I will probably have to sell my soul when it comes up for renewal this November.
I know à Labour strategist who thinks Labour will be able to Truss/Kwarteng mortgages line for the next decade like the Tories did with the winter of discontent from 1979 onwards.
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
There is some merit in the argument, over-simplified as it is of course, that the relative outperformance of the US and German economies in last decade was down to their cheaper energy.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
We do have these difficult problems all over the world, where identities don’t overlap with national borders. In peacetime there are ways to deal with them. War makes everything twice as hard.
Particularly difficult when a minority population is a legacy of former empire. It took me a while to clock that’s how the former Ottoman Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians were seen by the Serbs. Obviously the case too in Zimbabwe and S Africa, the pieds noirs in Algeria, the Ulster Scots, and no doubt many more.
Perhaps Neville Chamberlain thought that agreeing to the surrender of Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 would lead to a 'lasting settlement'. Perhaps he ridiculed the idea of Czech sovereignty.
See this knife, it’s the one that’s stabbed us in the back.
Daily Mail goes full Dolchstoßlegende. This is proper fascist stuff and ought to put to bed once and for all the idea that Brexit was some kind of cathartic event. Quite the opposite - it opened the door to a new style of paranoid, post-truth politics that only gets more extreme and dangerous the more its delusions are indulged and get roughed up by reality.
These fuckers are going to be like the Japanese at Okinawa 1945 when the UK rejoins the EU.
Football fans are weird. "We finished fourth; let's all laugh at this team that finished fifth." "We finished fifth; let's all laugh at this team that finished second."
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
Musing about price increases against pay increases consider:
Monthly Income £2,000 Monthly expenditure £1,000 Wealth increase £1,000
Now say prices increase by 10% and pay by only 8% - seemingly a real terms pay cut but in monetary terms:
Monthly income £2,160 Monthly expenditure £1,100 Wealth increase £1,060
The vital thing is to have income greater than expenditure and the key determinant of that is your housing situation.
For those who have paid off their mortgages then cost of living crises should be things that happen to other people.
Good morning
You can also say increased interest rates increase saving returns including from mortgage free home owners
Indeed, there will be many PBers whose increase in savings interest is more than paying for their increase in food and energy costs.
The costs of living increases will be affecting some people badly and others not at all.
I'm not sure how previous periods of high inflation affected the country but currently there seems to be a wide spit in how people are being affected.
It's a problem for the BOE. Raising interest rates is a powerful tool for curbing demand, slowing the economy and bringing down inflation, but with fewer mortgage holders than before and more on fixed deals it means that the impact of a given rate increase may be smaller and slower to impact the economy than before. But equally, the people it does affect are going to really feel it, all the more so if the Bank has to act more strongly to offset the blunted macro impact. Although I think the BOE hasn't covered itself in glory over the last few years, I don't envy them, they've got some tough calls to make.
That is a good point, the interest rates alone won’t deliver the recession they want, the government are going to have to be a lot less generous at the same time to additionally squeeze things. main thing what’s tipped Germany into technical recession is the turning off of government support, so Hunts levers likely more powerful than BoE at cooling things off quickly.
I'd be interested to know how much the German economy had benefitted from cheap Russian gas and cheap but dirty lignite in recent years.
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
There is some merit in the argument, over-simplified as it is of course, that the relative outperformance of the US and German economies in last decade was down to their cheaper energy.
I would be more sympathetic to the 'Russian speakers are a oppressed minority' claims if the Russian state hadn't oppressed non-Russian minorities for centuries.
That's the same kind of "remember what they did in 1845" stuff that poisoned Ireland for centuries. In any inter-ethnic rivalry there are always examples of oppression and indeed atrocities, and extremists justify oppression by pointing to the last thing the other side did. It's entirely understandable, but bystanders like us should try to avoid buying totally into either narrative and promote a lasting settlement. We should be doing all we can to prevent Ukraine being defeated, without providing unlimited assistance to endorse the "every inch of our soil is sacred and must be reconquered" stuff.
The Baltic States and Kazakhstan have sizeable Russian minorities. I’d be reluctant to set a precedent that Russia can simply hive off majority-Russian areas in neighbouring countries, in the absence of persecution.
Russia might also note the rising Chinese population in SE Siberia.
I’m curious - say Ukraine takes a chunk of Russia. Kicks all the Russians out. Does hat mean that in the interest of “peace” and “facts on the ground” the Russians should give that territory to Ukraine?
We do have these difficult problems all over the world, where identities don’t overlap with national borders. In peacetime there are ways to deal with them. War makes everything twice as hard.
Particularly difficult when a minority population is a legacy of former empire. It took me a while to clock that’s how the former Ottoman Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians were seen by the Serbs. Obviously the case too in Zimbabwe and S Africa, the pieds noirs in Algeria, the Ulster Scots, and no doubt many more.
Perhaps Neville Chamberlain thought that agreeing to the surrender of Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 would lead to a 'lasting settlement'. Perhaps he ridiculed the idea of Czech sovereignty.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
If you look at the programme of Opposition Platform - For Life it is NOT about joining Russia or ceceding from Ukraine. It does however favour Donbass autonomy. Where is the evidence for a substantial minority let alone a majority of people in any part of Ukraine wanting to be part of Russia?
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
I am so so glad I am on a five year fixed signed just before Truss but God I am terrified about when it comes to an end
I signed a 2-year fix in Nov 2021 at 0.89% - not taking the five year was possibly the worst decision I've made in my entire life.
I will probably have to sell my soul when it comes up for renewal this November.
I know à Labour strategist who thinks Labour will be able to Truss/Kwarteng mortgages line for the next decade like the Tories did with the winter of discontent from 1979 onwards.
It was a massive own goal, even if such high interest rates would have been reached eventually anyway.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
Is it ok if they're on top?
No.
Some of us even have contracts of employment which specifically enjoin us from from pursuing underlings.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
Is it ok if they're on top?
No.
Some of us even have contracts of employment which specifically enjoin us from from pursuing underlings.
This week's bot was almost impressive. Ranting about woke in schools. How democracy is failing. How strong leadership is needed.
We sure he is a Russian bot? And not one of the NatC speakers? TBH I look at some of the GBeebies people on Twitter and they don't sound much different.
This was one of Mayfair's comments:
"We can avoid recession if we admit 1 million immigrants next year."
Does it have a ring of truth?
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the sort of thing anyone on GB News might say.
The types of injury led MSF medics to conclude that the border fence, completed last June, was “dangerous.”
An MSF spokesperson later identified numerous cases of potentially infectious biological deposits found in the forests of western Belarus: "we think it's ursine faecal matter."
MSF might be better off criticising Russia and Belarus for their weaponisation of migration; flying migrants to Belarus and then taking them to the border.
It should be treated as an international people-smuggling crime.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
Is it ok if they're on top?
No.
Some of us even have contracts of employment which specifically enjoin us from from pursuing underlings.
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
So has it been stated that the colleague he had an affair with "worked under him", or are you just assuming that?
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
(5) an affair with someone who works directly for you is problematic.
From what I understand of the situation, a sacking doesn't sound over the top. The coverage, though, probably is.
Did the person work directly for him? In Schofield's statement, he is just described as a younger male colleague.
Schofield was just a presenter, wasn't he? Would a presenter normally have other staff working under him, unless in some personal capacity?
Just out of curiosity, can anyone clarify for me exactly why Phillip Schofield has been sacked?
Was it because: (1) He is gay (2) He was unfaithful to his wife (3) He had an affair with a colleague (4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
General rule if somebody works under you then you really shouldn’t have them under you in bed without declaring it to HR.
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
So has it been stated that the colleague he had an affair with "worked under him", or are you just assuming that?
Schofield got the boy the job - which puts them in a situation I would expect HR to be concerned about. E.g. what if the boy felt pressured into a relationship because of being got the job?
Schofield was also a 'star' of the show - and therefore had a certain power over the non-talent. As a certain PBer might say...
If you look at the programme of Opposition Platform - For Life it is NOT about joining Russia or ceceding from Ukraine. It does however favour Donbass autonomy. Where is the evidence for a substantial minority let alone a majority of people in any part of Ukraine wanting to be part of Russia?
That's fascinating polling: in 2022, before the invasion, just 9% of Ukrainians thought Russia and Ukraine should be one country.
And even in the far east of the country, the number is just 18%.
The figures are very similar to those in the 1991 Independence referendum.
They have long and different histories. Ukraine started as the Kyivan Rus in the 800s. It was a centre of civilization, with a federal system and constitutional nature. It prospered by trade between the Norse Kingdoms and the Roman Empire during the Byzantine era.
The Duchy of Moscow didn't even begin until five centuries late. It was a remote backwater and tribal monarchy. It achieved no status on its own but after the Mongol conquest, became the main town in that region as the Mongols used it as an administrative base for the region. It rapidly became a collaborationist state, helping the Mongols oppress her fellow Slavs. Moscow embraced Asian despotism and a role in economically exploiting her neighbours as tax collectors for the Tatar yoke, taking its own slice of the cash. Using that money it launched a campaign of brutal conquest, annexing peaceful trading republics. When it got big enough, it stole the name of the Rus and unduly laid claim to its history.
Comments
Cabinet office officials intervene like this at this key moment, without the political masters having any awareness? The motivation of the timing would be more so in the team around Sunak rather than cabinet office civil servants.
I still reckon this one will take a turn, and the deputy prime minister lose his job.
The speed with which they’ve gone from telling us that we lost & should get over it to claiming that we somehow won & have secretly been in charge all along is something to behold. However nuts it gets, I guess it will always be easier than admitting they got everything g wrong.
Can there be much that is actually security sensitive in covid WhatsApp? It has to be redaction merely to save embarrassment to top politicians. In which case it’s saying an enquiry to get to level of truth to learn the right lessons might as well disband right now and not waste anymore time or money, as it cannot achieve that objective.
It was still a great season for the Arse. 2nd by miles and CL football next year. They overperformed. Next season I expect them to fall back and be battling in that 4th to 7th space rather than challenging for the title. If the bookies disagree with me on this I'm planning a big sell.
The term originated among financial commentators online to explain why gilts were being sold off at the same time as the pound, a dynamic usually associated with poorer emerging markets during a currency crisis.
This week sterling and gilts marched in step once again as bond prices fell sharply and the currency weakened. However, rather than fears over irresponsible tax cuts from an iconoclastic government, the market volatility was triggered by concern that Britain’s stubborn inflation would not be quickly vanquished. “The morons are no longer in the government but at the Bank of England,” one market insider said.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britain-hit-by-moron-premium-after-mini-budget-disaster-7fx6zsdd7
It’s the same logic that had all remainers wanting to subsume Britain into a European superstate, or would imply anyone voting for historically Britain-friendly Fine Gael would welcome the redcoats parachuting into Dublin airport. Or voters for any Quebecois nationalist party want the French navy to mount an amphibious landing on Montreal.
The right wing equivalent of “Marxist” journalists at Novara Media who pretty obviously enjoy their bourgeois capitalist lives.
There is a clear distinction between the borders of Ukraine and the border of the area where people want to be in Ukraine, and how one feels about that depends partly on nationalism vs local choice and partly on whether the invasion entirely delegitimises pro-Russian sentiment in the east. It's possible to be disgusted by the invasion but to hope that the outcome isn't total Ukrainian nationalist domination of people who hate it - not least as that would cement conflict indefinitely.
A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda to show where each area actually wants to be is probably the only way to resolve it without permanent conflict - just as Denmark's willingness to offer that when they could have taken the whole province solved the issue permanently there. People who have been displaced should be entitled to vote in the area that they fled from, to avoid the outcome being biased to the invader.
Littlejohnthomas (I think I nicked that from Chris Morris) has to keep saying that Brexit is a good idea. So if people see it going badly, who else can he blame?
My reasoning. The markets saying we don’t believe your talk you are on top of your inflation problem. The Bank of England have an inflation target and responsibility for achieving it, but governments with one hand throwing out such generous money - not free money it comes from our high taxes and high borrowing we must repay back, with interest, but government certainly been generous spraying it out there - and doing zilch about price gouging with the other hand, has a far greater over heating affect than anything BoE done wrong.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65731795
Cyber attack?
Its likely now paying the economic cost for the strategic risk of the first.
With possibly the economic cost of the environmental damage of the second still to come at some point.
Nothing wrong about my posts either. Just ahead of the game.
Have you thought that my understanding of economic and political history through books and internet, is going to be much stronger than those of you who actually lived through the period, and were there at the time? We should expect two different views of the same thing to form - from a balanced, nuanced, expert explanation of what happened coming from detachment versus a bias view polluted by self interest from lived experience. I have strong sociological science on my side.
For example, look to your own Labour Party and the abysmal week they have had too. Yes they have had an abysmal week.
Political history facts here. When Labour came to power in 1974 it was with pledges and intent to spend money, their policy was for growth and spending proceeds of growth, and they started this straightaway in the two years under Wilson. But the number 1 problem to be tackled was that economy was already hot from going for growth and running toward overheating, so in the first two years of that government Labour ignorantly set up all the problems of the following three.
Fortunately the ignorance of that Labour government ushered in the brilliant Thatcher era, a government of aspiration on the side of everyone, curing the sick man of Europe with lots of economic sanity that is tackling the number 1 thing to tackle in the most effective way REGARDLESS of your manifesto tax cutting promises.
Right now today we have exactly the same situation. Using a mixture of BoE monetary tightening through interest rates and Jeremy Hunt withdrawing government handouts to households and businesses and government saying no to public sector strikers, the number one thing to tackle is being tackled. To actually avoid recession, to narrowly, technically avoid a technical recession, but fail to stop the inflation, that would be the failure position - though some daft posters to PB have been hailing that failure as success all week. Clueless idiots who try to impress us by saying I’ve worked in the city last 20 years so know what I am talking about, here are the basics you need to learn. Wtf 🤷♀️
If Labour don’t back what Sunak and Hunt are doing, the pain for gain Tories intend to inflict, then Labour will be on course to repeat the mistakes of both 74-76 and 1992 at the same time.
I wonder if he knows Donald Trump?
get togetherwork meetings at chequers?Wait. Now does this explain all frg entries in the diary?
What do all the pwrnap entries mean?
I suspect the decision will be taken by those on the ground.
And they might note that Czechia doesn't have a Sudeten German problem or Poland a Silesian German problem or Turkey an Ionian Greek problem anymore.
Or for a more recent situation what happened to the ethnic Serbs of Croatia.
If anything, on the contrary, it demonstrates that under this Tory government, common decency has lost its voice. We're left with the scrapings of the barrel - a bunch of unscrupulous, mediocre, tenth-rate rabble rousers, with a prime minister torn between compliance and impotence.
Have to go now, GF has gone out to the landing dressed as a plumber, and wants me to answer the door. 🪠
"A Slesvig-Holstein solution with genuine UN-supervised referenda "
The time for that would have been pre-2014, before Russia's actions caused massive population movements within Ukraine. And how do you count the votes of the thousands of people Russia's actions have killed? And do you include the thousands Russia has moved in as part of their population resettlements? A referenda is totally unworkabe, as you well know. You want to reward fascism.
Since there is no way a valid referenda can now be held, Russia can just f*** off.
1. Flush inflation out the system.
2. Kills off Greedinflation at same time.
3. Allows sustainable growth without overheating economy losing confidence of the markets and crashing the economy.
Evidence for this - learning lesson from Labour 1974-79.
I really have to go now, the plumbers here.
Colonel "Bat" Guano: I think you're some kind of deviated prevert. I think General Ripper found out about your preversion, and that you were organizing some kind of mutiny of preverts.
We should remember that the Party of Regions President Yanukyovich only got elected on the basis of doing an agreement with the EU which of course he reneged on. Over 80% of both Donbass regions voted to leave the Soviet Union. Crimea I would accept is trickier. I have no more sympathy for the increasingly geriatric types in Eastern Ukraine who want the Soviet Union back as I do for whites in South Africa wanting the return of the British Empire. If they are so keen on being Russian they should go and live there.
And does Ukraine get a choice in this matter ?
They might feel to accept the second part of your sentence would mean that they had been defeated.
And should Russia have to secede any territory to achieve your brave new world ?
Ethnic Ukrainian villages on the Russian side of the border ?
Kaliningrad - surely a strategic threat to Poland and the Baltic countries ?
Kurile Islands ?
Ethnic nations in Siberia or the Caucasus ?
This corrupts debate on both health and education, but the other way round for each.
May also give a hint as to why France has done economically relatively well since the invasion, with its once much more expensive but now comparatively price-competitive nuclear power.
Doesn’t explain South Korea though.
I will probably have to sell my soul when it comes up for renewal this November.
Russia's played this terribly from day one.
It's also important to note that countries don't buy gas: German power and industrial companies entered into purchase agreements with Russian and Norwegian energy companies. Some will have been on long-term fixed price contracts, but most were based on benchmark natural gas prices (sometimes with an oil price kicker.)
May also give a hint as to why Franc
Doesn’t explain South Korea though. We do have these difficult problems all over the world, where identities don’t overlap with national borders. In peacetime there are ways to deal with them. War makes everything twice as hard.
Particularly difficult when a minority population is a legacy of former empire. It took me a while to clock that’s how the former Ottoman Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians were seen by the Serbs. Obviously the case too in Zimbabwe and S Africa, the pieds noirs in Algeria, the Ulster Scots, and no doubt many more.
Which is also why Corbyn et al are not genuinely interested in peace.
Until a few years ago one of the key immigration systems did run from an office building next to the runways at Heathrow and it was major project to move it into a real data centre.
It looks like the deal will heavily favour Azerbaijan, as Armenia is not receiving much help from its usual helper Russia. This has upset Armenia so much that they may be leaving Russia's version of NATO, the CTSO.
In turn, this news *may* have a small effect on the Turkish presidential election second round, as Azerbaijan receives massive aid from Turkey.
Meanwhile outside Old Trafford.
Was it because:
(1) He is gay
(2) He was unfaithful to his wife
(3) He had an affair with a colleague
(4) He was asked by his employer whether he had had/was having an affair with a colleague and falsely denied it?
Was I think the crucial phrase!
Even if it consensual and no quid pro quo is involved.
And even in the far east of the country, the number is just 18%.
The figures are very similar to those in the 1991 Independence referendum.
Some of us even have contracts of employment which specifically enjoin us from from pursuing underlings.
It should be treated as an international people-smuggling crime.
It has two contradictory meanings.
Schofield was just a presenter, wasn't he? Would a presenter normally have other staff working under him, unless in some personal capacity?
Schofield was also a 'star' of the show - and therefore had a certain power over the non-talent. As a certain PBer might say...
The Duchy of Moscow didn't even begin until five centuries late. It was a remote backwater and tribal monarchy. It achieved no status on its own but after the Mongol conquest, became the main town in that region as the Mongols used it as an administrative base for the region. It rapidly became a collaborationist state, helping the Mongols oppress her fellow Slavs. Moscow embraced Asian despotism and a role in economically exploiting her neighbours as tax collectors for the Tatar yoke, taking its own slice of the cash. Using that money it launched a campaign of brutal conquest, annexing peaceful trading republics. When it got big enough, it stole the name of the Rus and unduly laid claim to its history.