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Starmer is more popular than Corbyn in London – politicalbetting.com
Starmer is more popular than Corbyn in London – politicalbetting.com
Favourability ratings among LondonersKeir Starmer: 40% favourable / 44% unfavourableSadiq Khan: 40% / 52%Jeremy Corbyn: 33% / 55%Rishi Sunak: 26% / 64%Susan Hall*: 22% / 21%Jeremy Hunt: 18% / 61%*New Tory mayoral candidate, 57% say "don't know"https://t.co/YEYoGBrGyS pic.twitter.com/BcF0lLee6C
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I think three or four people on it have died but not from The Vid. This was always the risk for those unscrupulous goal hangers who picked ancient people.
Many of them also have a child or multiple children.
I know which has the greater carbon footprint.
The Government is full of Bad People who do Bad Things, and I hope their genitals rot. From Plague. On Acid. In Space. Grrr.
Jezza has at least some policies
There was a VI poll in the recent YouGov London Research polling which suggested the Labour candidate still enjoyed a big lead over the Conservative.
ULEZ has been introduced but it was still school holidays last week so we get more of an indication this coming weel as to how many people will be caught and how much "noise" there is going to be in terms of protests and criminal damage.The decision of authorities like Surrey not to warn drivers heading into London they are liable to the ULEZ and any penalty charges seems remarkably petty and short-sighted yet presumably is part of the political game at work.
The losers will shout long and loud as will those who would oppose Khan even if he told them the Sun rose in the east, set in the west and bears defecate in wooded environments. It's the same old story - "I don't like X, I've never liked X, I don't know why I don't like X, I just don't".
I think, as with Johnson and Livingstone before him, you can criticise Khan for what he hasn't done as much as for what he has but that's to misunderstand the point of the London Mayoralty - it's not to help the people of London as much as to be a political symbol for London (with a fair dollop of self-aggrandisement for good measure).
Even if concentrated in outer London that doesn't look a lot of seats retained.
One is that the Londoners who dislike ULEZ mostly voted Conservative anyway. There isn't an election shifting wedge there.
The other is that Sue Hall really is a terrible candidate, who simply isn't up to a job of this profile.
https://www.politico.eu/article/giuliano-amato-muammar-gaddafiv-itavia-flight-870/
An explosive and unsubstantiated allegation that Paris gave the order to shoot down an Italian passenger jet in a bid to kill Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 1980 risks sparking a diplomatic row between Italy and France.
In an interview with Rome daily Repubblica published on Saturday, former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato claimed that the French air force inadvertently fired a missile that downed Itavia Flight 870 en route from Bologna to Palermo. The crash over the Mediterranean killed all 81 people on board and led to rampant speculation in Italy about the cause.
“A plan had been launched to hit the plane on which Gaddafi was flying,” Amato claimed in the interview, suggesting the strongman ruler was tipped off by Amato’s own former rival, ex-Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. Amato called on French President Emmanuel Macron to respond to the claim, saying “it would be an opportunity for the Élysée to wash away the shame that weighs on Paris.”
Khan would have been a senior figure in an election winning Labour Parliamentary Party and it's hard not to see him achieving a Cabinet post during the first term of a Starmer Government.
Perhaps he decided to play it safe and remain a big fish in a small pond but the problem is he is attracting personal animosity and as the new Government hits its mid term trough, he's going to find the fourth term a big challenge so does he stand again and lose or walk away hoping for something nice from Starmer?
A forensic reconstruction of the wreckage showed an internal explosion and no fragments from a warhead. The analysis done at Farnborough suggested that a bomb had been placed in the aft toilet.
The Italian response at the time was that the report was “politically unusable”
Wages, in real terms, are still lower than in 2008.
Productivity remains well behind global peers.
“Most of the debate about how to lift productivity, by boosting investment, the quality of the infrastructure, innovation and skills has taken place outside government, and outside parliament”.
The Government wants as many people in work as possible (laudable and good for the tax revenues). It is easier to hire new cheap labour than it is to invest in improving business practices via technology or automaton (especially true since the coming of Freedom of Movement).
High levels of employment do not represent high levels of productivity - indeed, the opposite may be true. Pay one unemployed man to dig a hole and then pay another to fill it in again is one response but in the 2010s and 2020s it was cheap labour from across the world coming to the EU and the UK.
That simply isn’t sustainable. Starmer may have to go to China.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-8-things-politicians-should-be-taking-about-but-arent-ccj2jnjvq
That's horrific.
Paul Scully would have been a more politically adept rival though his history is more with the LDs than Labour.
The combo of an ageing society with the insane and temporary solution of mass immigration is peculiarly stupid, and you can find this in France, Germany, USA, Spain, Holland, Sweden, and more, along with all the ills that spring from it
It is tempting to look at the list of problems and yield to blank despair. There's no fixing it. However there is one potential and significant reason for hope: AI. If it fulfils its promise it will make humans vastly more productive, and Britain's productiviy issues - as an example - will disppear overnight
Let us pray to the God of the bots
In WW1, France fought like lions but the loss of life was large.
Not enough men were left to father children
As a result the Armee was quite small in the 30s to fight WW2
So they fought badly and lost
Having learned the demographic lesson post WW2 they gave families help to have babies and babies they had
So that, combined with immigration, mean they have enough young people to look after the old
France is not a solution. They did well with nukes tho
I was trying to be cheerful
First these people migrate to the sprawling slums of their own country, then to neighbouring countries that offer better opportunities, then to the developed countries. It is a worldwide phenomenon. AI and automation is likely to make it worse by deindustrialising more people.
There was an excellent, if rather long, article here on it:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development/
It’s a view. It’s also nonsense
We get nurses from The Phillipines not from Singapore or South Korea.
From the David Smith piece GW mentioned earlier:
Output per hour worked:
USA £59
France, Germany £56
UK £47
Fix that, and the sums become a lot easier. Countries can choose to spend the money on megabucks wealth or taking all of August as holiday. Or something else. It's that simple and that difficult.
But it does require acknowledgement by the UK that, at several points in the past (plenty of blame to go round), we have collectively screwed up.
Read the article, you might learn something.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2023/09/03/heath-streak-dead-zimbabwe-colon-cancer-age-49/
Who else will do the job?
Unless you believe that the education system is so perfect that no potential doctor or nurse doesn’t miss out.
Of course, it's possible that having X% of foreign nurses is good for the system anyway. Certainly reduces the cost of Hindi translators for the old folks in the last hospital ward I visited. A hindi-speaking nurse was almost always on the ward or an adjacent one.
But who will do it as of now and the next few years?
Where does it end?
https://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/clearing/courses/search/undergraduate/nursing
If it's anything like teaching, improving retention might be a more fruitful path.
- Work longer and more flexibly
- Automate more healthcare incl. with AI
- State pensions to be later and lower, with increases capped at RPI
- Start saving into healthcare plans young, just as we now do for private pensions
If we do all that there's no reason we still can't have a very good, affordable and sustainable, quality of life.
He was one of Zimbabwe’s true world class players but his career will always be tarnished by his 8 year ban
Probably a handful at most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
(Unlike France, the US did, briefly, have a TFR above 2.1 for a couple of years, while George W. Bush was president.)
I would start with student loans forgiveness, tied to years in post.
Also employment practises from the late 20th cent. Upgrading to the 21st in one go might cause future shock.
We are now close to the one year anniversary of the “don’t underestimate Liz Truss” takes hitting their all time high.
One of the greatest Tweets of all time.
…while posting from the UAE.
Many of us have said it before, they are simply running out of men. Meanwhile the Russians seem better equipped, better trained, and even better motivated. NB this is a usually pro-Kyiv source
"It also lacks battlefield experience, from low ranks to commanding officers. Nor do they have many options to draw on somebody else's. The year 2022 ground down Ukraine's supply of experienced warfighters to the point where there can be said to be a shortage."
https://kyivindependent.com/new-brigade-bears-heavy-brunt-of-russias-onslaught-in-kharkiv-oblast/
Ukraine, I fear, is slowly losing this war. Or at least: not winning
His chance are however much better IMO in Islington North. Lots of people who are normally Labour voters and some who aren't (notably Greens, who are strong in the constituency) would be relaxed about having a sole independent leftie voice in Parliament, fulfilling much the same function as Caroline Lucas. I doubt if Starmer would really care too much.
Kiwis batted very well.
BBC:
"It is hard to assess the significance of the latest claims. Ukrainian officials are extremely tight-lipped when asked for precise details, preferring to allow the fog of war to shroud Kyiv's intentions and extremely reluctant to avoid releasing sensitive information.
It does not help that the forces closest to the fight sometimes give very different accounts of what is happening at the front.
Approached by the BBC on Saturday, Ukraine's 46th Air Assault Brigade said fighting was continuing near Russia's first line of defence, but that "no one has yet managed to go beyond the first line"
https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1698366128735608984?s=20
Meanwhile,
"Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
But Russians outnumber Ukrainians on the battlefield almost three to one, and Russia has a larger population from which to replenish its ranks."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/ukraine-russia-war-casualties.html
The Russians have enough men, arms and ammo that even if the Ukes make progress in the south the Russians can then advance in the north and east, streching Ukraine's numerically smaller army
It's likely gonna end in a muddy, bloody armistice. The only question is how much territory Ukraine will be forced to yield to get that truce. To my pessimistic mind. There are more upbeat opinions to be had
It also makes sense. The Ukrainians are absolutely gallant and determined, no doubt, but it is a small country compared to Russia, and the Ukes have lost 200,000 or more to death and injury. They've already lost many (most?) of their properly trained troops, and they are now relying on conscripts who get 3 weeks training in NATO then in they go
To deal with shortages in low-wage sectors, you do what the Australians do and offer six-month working visas to under-30s, with the requirement to leave afterwards, and strict enforcement of future visa rejections to anyone overstaying. Category 2.
For specific issues like nurses, allow 100k Filipinos Cat 1 immigration. They’re going to integrate well, and are generally not problematic communities.
The real problem, is that it seems to be actually impossible to deport anyone from the UK at the moment.
UAE has made huge strides in the past few years, towards offering something close to permanent residency to those who contribute. If you can earn $10k a month, you can get a 10-year renewable “Golden Visa”, also there’s visa by investment of $500k or so in business or property.
The troops now being deployed to push the Robotyne win down towards Tokmak, are the elite units held back earlier in the year, and working with the new NATO tanks and rockets.
I am referring to this report - I linked it, go see - on the Kharkiv front
Here it is again:
https://kyivindependent.com/new-brigade-bears-heavy-brunt-of-russias-onslaught-in-kharkiv-oblast/