An FA Council member who wrote on social media that "Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu" has resigned.
In his letter to FA chair Debbie Hewitt, Haq added: "Recent events have left me bereft of energy and hope. I have felt overwhelmed at how this has transpired
Apparently Trump has been channelling his inner Adolf in recent speeches. Perhaps the council member should try taking aim at the orange mobster...?
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
You're just pissed that, after numerous decades, the moron vote saw through Labour.
Are you hoping that the morons, having stopped voting Labour, have switched to your lot?
An FA Council member who wrote on social media that "Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu" has resigned.
In his letter to FA chair Debbie Hewitt, Haq added: "Recent events have left me bereft of energy and hope. I have felt overwhelmed at how this has transpired
Sounds as though it got a bit Nazi.
You know who else, Adollf Hitler would have been proud of ...
Well given a higher proportion of the Leave voters that have passed on, I am mildly surprised that the University of Bath isn´t focussing on the greater propensity to be dead amongst our more Brexity friends.
They were aiming for the ultimate sunnily lit uplands......
Well given a higher proportion of the Leave voters that have passed on, I am mildly surprised that the University of Bath isn´t focussing on the greater propensity to be dead amongst our more Brexity friends.
They were aiming for the ultimate sunnily lit uplands......
Sometimes it's better to adopt the American terms than invent neologisms for the sake of being different. There's nothing wrong with "cash machine", but ATM is better than "cashpoint".
tbh I cannot remember what we called them but even as late as the 1980s, the card was literally that, cardboard with holes, that would be kept by the machine and then posted back to you.
Boris Johnson's defence of his useful idiot status to Putin was that he was largely unaware of his usefulness and also blissfully ignorant of his stupidity
Corbyn had a similarity in his lack of awareness about his idiocy, but knows very well the usefulness of his kowtowing to Britain's enemies.
An FA Council member who wrote on social media that "Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu" has resigned.
In his letter to FA chair Debbie Hewitt, Haq added: "Recent events have left me bereft of energy and hope. I have felt overwhelmed at how this has transpired
Sounds as though it got a bit Nazi.
I wonder whether he thought "Heil come to regret that statement"
An FA Council member who wrote on social media that "Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu" has resigned.
In his letter to FA chair Debbie Hewitt, Haq added: "Recent events have left me bereft of energy and hope. I have felt overwhelmed at how this has transpired
Sounds as though it got a bit Nazi.
I wonder whether he thought "Heil come to regret that statement"
Lower taxes on everything, higher speed limits, getting rid of government departments, thats all pretty libetarian....i mean echo'ing the idiots on tiktok over letter to America, if we ignore the Jew Muslim bashing.
Sounds pie in the sky stuff, but quarter of the dutch just voted for it.
It's also standard far right stuff. I don't think you can be libertarian when one of your main policies is to ban religious expression, and another is to limit freedom of movement.
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
My opinion on yesterday's Autumn statement is that Hunt and Sunak know the next election is lost, and they have decided to abandon investment in public services in favour of reducing the high tax burden, continue to upgrade benefits in line with inflation, confirm the triple lock, and challenge labour to declare which taxes they will raise to pay for the NHS insatiable financial demands, schools, and of course RAAC remedial costs, law and order, and everything else that needs billions of public investment
The taxes from non dom and vat on schools is petty cash in the wider context of the needs of public services, and I doubt that the amount needed is even politically possible to achieve, and the assumption labour will have more than one term in office might be a bit over optimistic
The covid crisis and war in Ukraine have taken a huge toll on UK finances, and the rest of Europe, and it is inevitable, despite the efforts of politicians to deny it, that everyone apart from the wealthy will be poorer for a considerable time to come
And on Brexit my wife and I voted remain but have accepted it is over and we have to work to attain a friendlier relationship but to those who see the EU as wonderful, I think that they may well be looking with considerable alarm at how many EU countries are moving to the right with unexpected consequences going forward
An FA Council member who wrote on social media that "Adolf Hitler would be proud of Benjamin Netanyahu" has resigned.
In his letter to FA chair Debbie Hewitt, Haq added: "Recent events have left me bereft of energy and hope. I have felt overwhelmed at how this has transpired
Sounds as though it got a bit Nazi.
I wonder whether he thought "Heil come to regret that statement"
Can he understand what all the fuß is about?
I am not sure whether that comment is germane to the general gist
Lower taxes on everything, higher speed limits, getting rid of government departments, thats all pretty libetarian....i mean echo'ing the idiots on tiktok over letter to America, if we ignore the Jew Muslim bashing.
Sounds pie in the sky stuff, but quarter of the dutch just voted for it.
It's also standard far right stuff. I don't think you can be libertarian when one of your main policies is to ban religious expression, and another is to limit freedom of movement.
Obviously i am mocking the term used for Argentinan president.
I am reminded though of infamous iain dale interview with nick griffin where he said ok lets put all the anti-immigration stuff to one side, what are your other policies....it was like Jeremy Corbyn on steroids....nationalise everything, government subsided this, that and the other.
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
Yea, but no-one knows how much Vlad spent on his campaign. He must have thought it well worth it, and it was a damn sight cheaper than invading another country.
Is thickos can't be trusted to vote, i think we also need to ensure thickos can't become MPs.....
It would have stopped Nadine Dorries and Jared O'Mara, so I am all for it.
Why stop at MPs? Apply to SPADs and civil servants (including real world civil servants working for quangos).
No more Cummings. Or Case. Or Acland-Hood. Or Vennells.
Cummings is not thick.
Anyway, thickos have their place. It's often a thicko who's willing to ask the Emperor's New Clothes question, without tying it into a conspiracy theory. Don't underestimate the power of a simple question.
It's not them asking the questions. It's the fact they keep epically fucking up the answers that's the problem.
Edit - incidentally what evidence do you have that Cummings isn't thick? He's been wrong on every single major thing he's ever done and never shown the slightest sign of understanding any even mildly complex issue at anything beyond a very basic level.
Cummings is clever. He's just unpleasant and sociopathic with it. He doesn't understand people - or, put another way, he understands them as a mob but not as individuals (and not always as a mob).
Cleverness is a useful attribute in politics, as in life - but only if applied to judgement and empathy, both of which Cummings severely lacks.
In the US, there used to be (and probably still is) a "J curve" in voting. Democrats won the most votes from those with the least education -- and from those with the most education. Republicans did best with those in the middle, so if you graphed Democratic vote by education, it looked something like a "J".
What that says generally about cognitive ability and political choices, I leave to others to discuss. But I can say that US colleges and universities -- where cognitive abilities are higher than average -- are in serious trouble.
What an utter wanker our unelected head of state is, profiting from the dead, it's not like he needs the money, Donald Trump would be embarrassed to grift like this.
Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens
Exclusive: Assets of thousands of people in north-west England used to upgrade king’s property empire via archaic custom
‘He would turn in his grave’: the dead whose assets went to King Charles’s estate
How royal estates use bona vacantia to collect money from dead people
The king is profiting from the deaths of thousands of people in the north-west of England whose assets are secretly being used to upgrade a commercial property empire managed by his hereditary estate, the Guardian can reveal.
The Duchy of Lancaster, a controversial land and property estate that generates huge profits for King Charles III, has collected tens of millions of pounds in recent years under an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times.
Financial assets known as bona vacantia, owned by people who died without a will or known next of kin, are collected by the duchy. Over the last 10 years, it has collected more than £60m in the funds. It has long claimed that, after deducting costs, bona vacantia revenues are donated to charities.
However, only a small percentage of these revenues is being given to charity. Internal duchy documents seen by the Guardian reveal how funds are secretly being used to finance the renovation of properties that are owned by the king and rented out for profit.
The duchy essentially inherits bona vacantia funds from people whose last known address was in a territory that in the middle ages was known as Lancashire county palatine and ruled by a duke. Today, the area comprises Lancashire and parts of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Cumbria.
A leaked internal duchy policy from 2020 gave officials at the king’s estate licence to use bona vacantia funds on a broad array of its profit-generating portfolio. Codenamed “SA9”, the policy acknowledges spending the money in this way could result in an “incidental” benefit to the privy purse, the king’s personal income.
Properties identified in other leaked documents as eligible for use of the funds include town houses, holiday lets, rural cottages, agricultural buildings, a former petrol station and barns, including one used to facilitate pheasant and partridge shoots in Yorkshire.
Upgrades include new roofs, double-glazing windows, boiler installations and replacements of doors and lintels. One document references the renovation of an old farmhouse in Yorkshire, helping transform it into a high-end residential let. Another upgrade is helping turn a farm building into commercial offices.
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
But it is Thanksgiving here: Megan McArdle thinks Americans have much to be thankful for. For example:
"In 1900, about 44 man hours — or rather, lady hours — were needed each week to make the meals for a typical middle-class household and then clean up afterward. . . . "From your great-great-grandmother’s point of view, you live in a fairy story where an army of magical mechanical servants helps prepare the feast.
Your meal is also easier on the wallet. In 1915, Chicago grocers were advertising turkeys as low as 28 cents a pound, or about $8.35 a pound in today’s dollars — compared with the average $1.14 Americans pay today for a frozen bird ($2.05 for a fresh one). This is even more striking as a percentage of wages, which averaged $687 for a man in 1915, or about $20,500 in today’s dollars, and for a much longer workweek. Nor is this just some anomaly about turkeys; in that era, food consumed more than one-third of household budgets, compared with about 13 percent today." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/22/thanksgiving-food-costs-delicacies-history/
Her argument would be even stronger had she mentioned that a much larger proportion of American families more than a century ago were living on farms, and raising much of their own food.
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
Remain was led by thickos but voted for by smart people Leave was led by smart people but voted for by thickos*
That's right, isn't it?
*with exceptions, such as your good self, of course
They did analyses controlling for other factors: "The individual level controls included age (in cubic form); gender; ethnicity, education; labour force status; interview mode; the number of sources used for information about news and current affairs; type of newspapers used for information about news and current affairs; political party supports/most aligned to; self-assessed general health; whether the respondent suffers from long-term health problems; and personality traits—Openness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness—measured using the short 15-item Big-Five inventory (BFI-15). The household level controls included the logarithm of monthly household income (adjusted by the OECD-modified equivalence scale and deflated by the Consumer Price Index); marital status; the number of dependent children in the household; the square root of household size; housing tenure; whether the respondent or partner is the household financial decision maker; lives in an urban location; and a set of region of residence dummy variables." They even did an analysis where they looked within couples who voted differently.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
What an utter wanker our unelected head of state is, profiting from the dead, it's not like he needs the money, Donald Trump would be embarrassed to grift like this.
Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens
Exclusive: Assets of thousands of people in north-west England used to upgrade king’s property empire via archaic custom
‘He would turn in his grave’: the dead whose assets went to King Charles’s estate
How royal estates use bona vacantia to collect money from dead people
The king is profiting from the deaths of thousands of people in the north-west of England whose assets are secretly being used to upgrade a commercial property empire managed by his hereditary estate, the Guardian can reveal.
The Duchy of Lancaster, a controversial land and property estate that generates huge profits for King Charles III, has collected tens of millions of pounds in recent years under an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times.
Financial assets known as bona vacantia, owned by people who died without a will or known next of kin, are collected by the duchy. Over the last 10 years, it has collected more than £60m in the funds. It has long claimed that, after deducting costs, bona vacantia revenues are donated to charities.
However, only a small percentage of these revenues is being given to charity. Internal duchy documents seen by the Guardian reveal how funds are secretly being used to finance the renovation of properties that are owned by the king and rented out for profit.
The duchy essentially inherits bona vacantia funds from people whose last known address was in a territory that in the middle ages was known as Lancashire county palatine and ruled by a duke. Today, the area comprises Lancashire and parts of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Cumbria.
A leaked internal duchy policy from 2020 gave officials at the king’s estate licence to use bona vacantia funds on a broad array of its profit-generating portfolio. Codenamed “SA9”, the policy acknowledges spending the money in this way could result in an “incidental” benefit to the privy purse, the king’s personal income.
Properties identified in other leaked documents as eligible for use of the funds include town houses, holiday lets, rural cottages, agricultural buildings, a former petrol station and barns, including one used to facilitate pheasant and partridge shoots in Yorkshire.
Upgrades include new roofs, double-glazing windows, boiler installations and replacements of doors and lintels. One document references the renovation of an old farmhouse in Yorkshire, helping transform it into a high-end residential let. Another upgrade is helping turn a farm building into commercial offices.
What an utter wanker our unelected head of state is, profiting from the dead, it's not like he needs the money, Donald Trump would be embarrassed to grift like this.
Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens
Exclusive: Assets of thousands of people in north-west England used to upgrade king’s property empire via archaic custom
‘He would turn in his grave’: the dead whose assets went to King Charles’s estate
How royal estates use bona vacantia to collect money from dead people
The king is profiting from the deaths of thousands of people in the north-west of England whose assets are secretly being used to upgrade a commercial property empire managed by his hereditary estate, the Guardian can reveal.
The Duchy of Lancaster, a controversial land and property estate that generates huge profits for King Charles III, has collected tens of millions of pounds in recent years under an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times.
Financial assets known as bona vacantia, owned by people who died without a will or known next of kin, are collected by the duchy. Over the last 10 years, it has collected more than £60m in the funds. It has long claimed that, after deducting costs, bona vacantia revenues are donated to charities.
However, only a small percentage of these revenues is being given to charity. Internal duchy documents seen by the Guardian reveal how funds are secretly being used to finance the renovation of properties that are owned by the king and rented out for profit.
The duchy essentially inherits bona vacantia funds from people whose last known address was in a territory that in the middle ages was known as Lancashire county palatine and ruled by a duke. Today, the area comprises Lancashire and parts of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Cumbria.
A leaked internal duchy policy from 2020 gave officials at the king’s estate licence to use bona vacantia funds on a broad array of its profit-generating portfolio. Codenamed “SA9”, the policy acknowledges spending the money in this way could result in an “incidental” benefit to the privy purse, the king’s personal income.
Properties identified in other leaked documents as eligible for use of the funds include town houses, holiday lets, rural cottages, agricultural buildings, a former petrol station and barns, including one used to facilitate pheasant and partridge shoots in Yorkshire.
Upgrades include new roofs, double-glazing windows, boiler installations and replacements of doors and lintels. One document references the renovation of an old farmhouse in Yorkshire, helping transform it into a high-end residential let. Another upgrade is helping turn a farm building into commercial offices.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
"In a statement they say a "terror tunnel network" under the hospital "exploited electricity and resources taken from the hospital" - a claim the Israeli military made in a video it shared on X yesterday, which shows toilets, a kitchen area, cables and an air conditioning unit, in tunnels they say are below the hospital"
This "they say" nonsense is really dangerous....western journalists have been, there are drone shots starting from the hospital descending into the tunnels, etc. But BBC still reporting as if they could be lying.
You could criticise and say what is shown isn't evidence of a command and control centre. The Israeli claim they have found it, but its booby trapped and they are currently in process of clearing it.
The BBC can't even get as far as calling Hamas, a group who raped and murdered well over a thousand people on 7th October, terrorists.
Test:
Deaths laid at the door of Hamas: all of them.
And the 4,143 Palestinians killed in the West Bank in the last 10 years - is That Hamas's fault as well? Coincedentally, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli fatalities in/because of Gaza will shortly be about the same at 13 to 1.
People arriving on study-related visas accounted for the largest proportion (39%) of long-term immigration of non-EU nationals to the UK last year, at 378,000 people, up slightly from 320,000 in the previous 12 months.
Me thinks there is a loophole being exploited here....400k non-eu foreign students per year....
And how many leave? If the numbers leaving don't track closely to the numbers arriving (with a bit of lag) then either we have a mysterious plague killing foreign students or a lot of them are just here to exploit the student visa.
On a totally less contentious topic: Russian influence in elections.
It is certainly highly convenient for Putin that Wilders, a man who has repeatedly expressed sympathy for Russia, opposed sanctions and opposes any military aid for Ukraine, has just defied opinion polls and come first in the election.
Is he simply very lucky? What with this, and the recent Slovakian election which was also a surprise vs polling, and the convenient timing of the 7th October attacks. Or is it remotely possibly that his people might have been up to no good?
Either you trust people with the vote or you don't. If you think elections are so easy for hostile actors to swing, then you need to come up with an alternative system.
You can try and prevent or counter disinformation. I think that comes before ditching elections.
Or you can say “oh gosh, 30% of the voters believe this. I’d better come up with convincing arguments to persuade them otherwise”
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
People arriving on study-related visas accounted for the largest proportion (39%) of long-term immigration of non-EU nationals to the UK last year, at 378,000 people, up slightly from 320,000 in the previous 12 months.
Me thinks there is a loophole being exploited here....400k non-eu foreign students per year....
And how many leave? If the numbers leaving don't track closely to the numbers arriving (with a bit of lag) then either we have a mysterious plague killing foreign students or a lot of them are just here to exploit the student visa.
Or more have come in post covid so more are staying than going from previous courses.
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
I’ve got a big house with 5 people living in it, with somebody here all of the time, we use a lot of energy, two young gamers in the mix.
Is thickos can't be trusted to vote, i think we also need to ensure thickos can't become MPs.....
It would have stopped Nadine Dorries and Jared O'Mara, so I am all for it.
Why stop at MPs? Apply to SPADs and civil servants (including real world civil servants working for quangos).
No more Cummings. Or Case. Or Acland-Hood. Or Vennells.
Cummings is not thick.
Anyway, thickos have their place. It's often a thicko who's willing to ask the Emperor's New Clothes question, without tying it into a conspiracy theory. Don't underestimate the power of a simple question.
It's not them asking the questions. It's the fact they keep epically fucking up the answers that's the problem.
Edit - incidentally what evidence do you have that Cummings isn't thick? He's been wrong on every single major thing he's ever done and never shown the slightest sign of understanding any even mildly complex issue at anything beyond a very basic level.
He seems to ask the right questions nearly 100% of the time. He seems to have the wrong answers 100% of the time.
I am reminded of an incident - a group of Scandinavian professional gamblers I used to drink with (jokingly - a few quid) made some money on a mutual friend who had a perfect track record of picking losers on horse races.
Lower taxes on everything, higher speed limits, getting rid of government departments, thats all pretty libetarian....i mean echo'ing the idiots on tiktok over letter to America, if we ignore the Jew Muslim bashing.
Sounds pie in the sky stuff, but quarter of the dutch just voted for it.
It's also standard far right stuff. I don't think you can be libertarian when one of your main policies is to ban religious expression, and another is to limit freedom of movement.
Obviously i am mocking the term used for Argentinan president.
I am reminded though of infamous iain dale interview with nick griffin where he said ok lets put all the anti-immigration stuff to one side, what are your other policies....it was like Jeremy Corbyn on steroids....nationalise everything, government subsided this, that and the other.
Well, there *is* a reason it is called National Socialism. Those are the standard policies of the far-right.
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
Bona vacantia money either goes the the Treasury or to the Duchy.
The Duchy appears to be using it to improve the environmental footprint of its properties and/or bring old properties back into use. I am not convinced that the Treasury uses it as productively.
But in any event, it’s a little unpleasant of you to try and turn it into a personal attack on the King. This is a historical anomaly that know one has thought about in the past. I doubt he has particularly noticed it (you may have realised that the Duchy is overseen by a Cabinet Minister* appointed by the PM).
Once again, more evidence of Hamas’ cynical mistreatment of Gazan civilians.
During an IDF operation in the outskirts of Jabaliya, our troops found a large number of weapons and ammunition hidden under children’s beds and inside bedrooms, in a civilian building linked to a senior Hamas operative.
If - for example - they linked it to university degrees then you are just tracking age.
Do you mean they're tracking the opposite of age? Because a far larger proportion of young people have university degrees than of older people.
Or maybe you don't have much cognitive ability.
That’s a weird response. I guess you are a thicko since you misinterpreted my post like that.
“Tracking age” just means there is a link. It doesn’t say which direction the relationship goes.
To spell it out in words of one syllable: Young people have more degrees. A greater proportion of young people voted for Remain. If they are saying that degrees = cognitive ability then, unless they control for age, their analysis is flawed.
If - for example - they linked it to university degrees then you are just tracking age.
Do you mean they're tracking the opposite of age? Because a far larger proportion of young people have university degrees than of older people.
Or maybe you don't have much cognitive ability.
That’s a weird response. I guess you are a thicko since you misinterpreted my post like that.
“Tracking age” just means there is a link. It doesn’t say which direction the relationship goes.
To spell it out in words of one syllable: Young people have more degrees. A greater proportion of young people voted for Remain. If they are saying that degrees = cognitive ability then, unless they control for age, their analysis is flawed.
Nearly half of those words (after the colon) have more than one syllable.
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
People arriving on study-related visas accounted for the largest proportion (39%) of long-term immigration of non-EU nationals to the UK last year, at 378,000 people, up slightly from 320,000 in the previous 12 months.
Me thinks there is a loophole being exploited here....400k non-eu foreign students per year....
And how many leave? If the numbers leaving don't track closely to the numbers arriving (with a bit of lag) then either we have a mysterious plague killing foreign students or a lot of them are just here to exploit the student visa.
Or more have come in post covid so more are staying than going from previous courses.
Hence my comment about lag.
Covid is stuffing the figures at the moment, but that won't last forever. If the cohort who came in 2022 haven't largely gone by 2026 it will be obvious we have a massive problem.
If - for example - they linked it to university degrees then you are just tracking age.
Do you mean they're tracking the opposite of age? Because a far larger proportion of young people have university degrees than of older people.
Or maybe you don't have much cognitive ability.
That’s a weird response. I guess you are a thicko since you misinterpreted my post like that.
“Tracking age” just means there is a link. It doesn’t say which direction the relationship goes.
To spell it out in words of one syllable: Young people have more degrees. A greater proportion of young people voted for Remain. If they are saying that degrees = cognitive ability then, unless they control for age, their analysis is flawed.
Nearly half of those words (after the colon) have more than one syllable.
I thought about making my point literally in words of one syllable but decided that life is too short and @Chris wasn’t worth the effort
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
I’ve got a big house with 5 people living in it, with somebody here all of the time, we use a lot of energy, two young gamers in the mix.
You need to encourage the young gamers to get out more (to friends' houses, so their families can foot the bill).
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
TLDR: they used cognitive in the Understanding Society longitudinal study (general purpose study widely used in social science and other population science) pre-Brexit. They controlled also for age and demographics, including employment status and income etc.
Doesn't mean the analysis isn't bollox, but on the face of it from a very quick skim it looks pukka enough.
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
Probably couldn't get the ball-bearings out when it was nice and frosty.
Once again, more evidence of Hamas’ cynical mistreatment of Gazan civilians.
During an IDF operation in the outskirts of Jabaliya, our troops found a large number of weapons and ammunition hidden under children’s beds and inside bedrooms, in a civilian building linked to a senior Hamas operative.
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
We're almost back in the territory of Alastair Meeks's "aren't leavers just ghastly?" headers here.
It may be true. But largely because the interests of those who work with their heads are more aligned with Remain; those who work with their hands more aligned with leave. Causation <> correlation, and all that.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
I’ve got a big house with 5 people living in it, with somebody here all of the time, we use a lot of energy, two young gamers in the mix.
You need to encourage the young gamers to get out more (to friends' houses, so their families can foot the bill).
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
And now, I find my new supplier is apparently a symbol of antisemitism I'm not blessed in the choosing energy suppliers stakes.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
And now, I find my new supplier is apparently a symbol of antisemitism I'm not blessed in the choosing energy suppliers stakes.
And of course squid is a term of abuse among many on PB. Are cuttlefish, Spirula and nautili safe, I wonder?
P{S Bit of a bummer it being the 8 limbed ones that are so non-PC - if it was a squid bath toy you could cut off the two tentacles and call it an octopus.
If - for example - they linked it to university degrees then you are just tracking age.
Do you mean they're tracking the opposite of age? Because a far larger proportion of young people have university degrees than of older people.
Or maybe you don't have much cognitive ability.
That’s a weird response. I guess you are a thicko since you misinterpreted my post like that.
“Tracking age” just means there is a link. It doesn’t say which direction the relationship goes.
To spell it out in words of one syllable: Young people have more degrees. A greater proportion of young people voted for Remain. If they are saying that degrees = cognitive ability then, unless they control for age, their analysis is flawed.
Nearly half of those words (after the colon) have more than one syllable.
I thought about making my point literally in words of one syllable but decided that life is too short and @Chris wasn’t worth the effort
"I thought I could make my point in one-sound words but life is too short and @Chris is not worth it"
There you go.
And
"Young people have more degrees. More young people gave their vote for In. If they say that degrees mean brains then, if they leave age out, their view is flawed."
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
Yea, but no-one knows how much Vlad spent on his campaign. He must have thought it well worth it, and it was a damn sight cheaper than invading another country.
Funny when it actually led to the UK being a stronger opponent to Putin than the EU. Who could possibly have seen that coming.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
And now, I find my new supplier is apparently a symbol of antisemitism I'm not blessed in the choosing energy suppliers stakes.
And of course squid is a term of abuse among many on PB. Are cuttlefish, Spirula and nautili safe, I wonder?
P{S Bit of a bummer it being the 8 limbed ones that are so non-PC - if it was a squid bath toy you could cut off the two tentacles and call it an octopus.
Reading the PVV piece, I was struck by their energy polices: to wit, more coal and natural gas.
In the old days, the Netherlands was a big producer of natural gas; the Groningen field was one of the largest in Europe and back in the early 1970s, it exported gas to its neighbours. (And, indeed, the phrase "The Dutch Disease" was coined to describe what happened to a developed economy that became too dependent on primary energy exports.)
Natural gas production has fallen a long way since then, and now accounts for around a third of Dutch consumption.
Now, I have no problems with more oil & gas exploration. The Netherlands is a fairly small place, however, and that makes it unlikely that there are significant quantities of easily exploitable, undiscovered, oil & gas.
Discouraging the use of renewables (which is explicit VVD policy), therefore, basically means greater reliance on... Russia and the Middle East.
Whatever your views on global warming, this does not seem to be an optimal strategy for Dutch consumers.
This is pointless shoot the messenger analysis. What was the message Leave voters were trying to send and why?
Making some effort to understand that and then for politicians to respond to it would be a damn sight more useful. One day someone might actually get round to it.
Instead we get "oh they're all thickos" followed by "hooray!" when they vote the Tories out. And then they'll be ignored again.
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
Yea, but no-one knows how much Vlad spent on his campaign. He must have thought it well worth it, and it was a damn sight cheaper than invading another country.
Funny when it actually led to the UK being a stronger opponent to Putin than the EU. Who could possibly have seen that coming.
Next.
The UK has been great.
But the scary thing is not "the EU", it is the election - and potential election - of politicians across the world who are openly hostile to Ukraine and sympathetic to Russia.
And we need to make sure that we do everything in our power to support Ukraine at this time.
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
Silly. Why would we want to join NAFTA when we already have a large (and rising) trade surplus with their largest member?
That (or something similar) is what I was thinking. He's good on the world but I think he has a blind spot when it comes to the UK. Relationships between the UK (state) and Ireland (state) were historically very bad for obvious reasons. But following the GFA, Osborne giving money to Ireland during the GFC, British television viewership in Ireland, the growth in social media forcing an anglophone common culture, and no doubt other reasons, relations between UK and Ireland have become enormously improved. We're not allies, but much of the antagonism has gone away.
As for the NAFTA membership: was that ever realistically on the table? UK seems to be doing if not well since Brexit then at least tolerably, and Brexit problems have been subsumed into Covid and demographic crises. IIUC nobody is currently even looking at it in UK.
Proportion of voters for those parties happy to have a coalition with Wilders.
As per prior thread I thought BBB voter fungibility would be high with PVV, surprised VVD is quite that high mind tbh. Shellacking next time round for VVD and NSC if they conspire to keep Wilders out of government
TLDR: they used cognitive in the Understanding Society longitudinal study (general purpose study widely used in social science and other population science) pre-Brexit. They controlled also for age and demographics, including employment status and income etc.
Doesn't mean the analysis isn't bollox, but on the face of it from a very quick skim it looks pukka enough.
Yes thought so. There's no way they'd have conflated cognitive ability with having a degree. I mean that just doesn't follow. Look at our resident brainbox, Leon. He doesn't have a degree. But he travels. He reads books. He has a PhD from the university of life.
Of course the Tories will go for the moron vote. They’ll fill their heads with any old shite they can think of to get that cross in the box. Obvs immigration. Culture war bollocks. Backsliding on Brexit.
The calculation is with the votes of clever, selfish amoral bastards who are happy to fuck the country as long as they think they’ll make (more) money from it and the morons who’ll be seduced by the bollocks the client media churn out - along with a few million, often southern but not exclusively, useful fucking idiots who aren’t especially rich or stupid and get shafted along with the rest of us but actually seem to believe the Tory shite despite the stark evidence of the last 13 years - will be just enough to win.
And sadly, they might be right. It worked for Trump once, and may well do again.
Did I see someone earlier saying they’ve sneaked through a massive increase in the cap on election spending? If so, there you go. Prepare for an avalanche of utter, utter shite to corral the mouth breathers. They’ll simply use massive funding from shady billionaires to attempt to lie their way to victory. Just like they did with Brexit.
Ignoring the fact that Remain spent 45% more than Leave in the Brexit campaign. And that is even after ignoring all the additional Government spending promoting Remain that was not included in the calculations.
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
Yea, but no-one knows how much Vlad spent on his campaign. He must have thought it well worth it, and it was a damn sight cheaper than invading another country.
Funny when it actually led to the UK being a stronger opponent to Putin than the EU. Who could possibly have seen that coming.
Next.
This is like shooting rats in a barrel. Brexit led to the strongest opponent to Putin leaving the EU, making the EU's response weaker. Your insistence that, despite inventing the Single Market and being behind EU expansion, we had "no influence" is another remarkable exercise in self-delusion in the face of, well, actual evidence.
As I have repeatedly said, often in words of one syllable, the UK had a great deal of influence over the EU's policy in eastern Europe and our absence from the bloc assisted its wet lettuce response. Even if I'm wrong, Iraq shows we have always been perfectly capable of breaking ranks. Brexit was, and continues to be, a geopolitical shitshow for the EU and UK defended only by the hard of thinking.
Nevertheless, congratulations on persuading most of the country and yourselves this fuckup was a great idea and continuing with that delusion as opinion polls continue to show the scales falling from the eyes of most.
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
Silly. Why would we want to join NAFTA when we already have a large (and rising) trade surplus with their largest member?
That (or something similar) is what I was thinking. He's good on the world but I think he has a blind spot when it comes to the UK. Relationships between the UK (state) and Ireland (state) were historically very bad for obvious reasons. But following the GFA, Osborne giving money to Ireland during the GFC, British television viewership in Ireland, the growth in social media forcing an anglophone common culture, and no doubt other reasons, relations between UK and Ireland have become enormously improved. We're not allies, but much of the antagonism has gone away.
As for the NAFTA membership: was that ever realistically on the table? UK seems to be doing if not well since Brexit then at least tolerably, and Brexit problems have been subsumed into Covid and demographic crises. IIUC nobody is currently even looking at it in UK.
Also, NAFTA doesn't exist: it's now the USMCA. It's also hideously complex, with rule of origin and tariff levels spelled out on a per product level, and involves a dispute resolution mechanism that is highly tilted towards the US.
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
and people still think we should keep the monarchy...
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
and people still think we should keep the monarchy...
We should remind him what happened to the first King Charles.
This is pointless shoot the messenger analysis. What was the message Leave voters were trying to send and why?
Making some effort to understand that and then for politicians to respond to it would be a damn sight more useful. One day someone might actually get round to it.
Instead we get "oh they're all thickos" followed by "hooray!" when they vote the Tories out. And then they'll be ignored again.
Although you could say Leave voters (esp in the red wall) are being the very opposite of ignored. They got their Referendum via Nigel Farage, their Brexit via Boris Johnson, and now Keir Starmer has to a large extent based his political project on winning them over.
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely 2:58 incompetent in wallowing in 3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the 3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit 3:05 that the only path forward for them is a 3:07 crippling deal with the United States 3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA 3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of 3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits 3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge 3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're 3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But 3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to 3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do, 3:26 and then everything that has made 3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical 3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
Silly. Why would we want to join NAFTA when we already have a large (and rising) trade surplus with their largest member?
That (or something similar) is what I was thinking. He's good on the world but I think he has a blind spot when it comes to the UK. Relationships between the UK (state) and Ireland (state) were historically very bad for obvious reasons. But following the GFA, Osborne giving money to Ireland during the GFC, British television viewership in Ireland, the growth in social media forcing an anglophone common culture, and no doubt other reasons, relations between UK and Ireland have become enormously improved. We're not allies, but much of the antagonism has gone away.
As for the NAFTA membership: was that ever realistically on the table? UK seems to be doing if not well since Brexit then at least tolerably, and Brexit problems have been subsumed into Covid and demographic crises. IIUC nobody is currently even looking at it in UK.
Also, NAFTA doesn't exist: it's now the USMCA. It's also hideously complex, with rule of origin and tariff levels spelled out on a per product level, and involves a dispute resolution mechanism that is highly tilted towards the US.
We get to sit back and wait with our CPTPP partners, and strike a future deal to let the U.S. in to that on terms we collectively negotiate with our joint weight,
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
Probably couldn't get the ball-bearings out when it was nice and frosty.
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
and people still think we should keep the monarchy...
We should remind him what happened to the first King Charles.
Or indeed any king named Charles. From Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
Charles.
An ill-omened name for kings:
England: Charles I. was beheaded by his subjects.
Charles II. lived long in exile.
Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, died in poverty and disgrace in France.
France: Charles I., the Bald, marching to repel the invading Saracens, was forsaken by his followers, and died of poison at Brios.
Charles II., the Fat, reigned wretchedly, and died a beggarly dependent on the stinting bounty of the Archbishop of Metz.
Charles III., the Simple, died in the dungeon of Château Thierry.
Charles IV., the Fair, reigned six years, married thrice, but buried all his children except one daughter, who was forbidden by the Salic law to succeed to the crown.
Charles VI. lived and died an idiot or madman.
Charles VII. starved himself to death.
Charles VIII. smashed his head against the lintel of a doorway in the Château Amboise, and died in agony.
Charles IX. died at the age of twenty-four, harrowed in conscience for the part he had taken in the “Massacre of St. Bartholomew.”
Charles X. spent a quarter of a century in exile, and when he succeeded to the throne, fled for his life and died in exile.
Charles le Téméraire, of Burgundy, lost his life at Nancy, where he was utterly defeated by the Swiss.
Naples: Charles I. saw the French massacred in the “Sicilian Vespers,” and experienced only disasters.
Charles II., the Lame, was in captivity at his father’s death. Charles III., his grandson, was assassinated. (See also Jane.)
Reading the PVV piece, I was struck by their energy polices: to wit, more coal and natural gas.
In the old days, the Netherlands was a big producer of natural gas; the Groningen field was one of the largest in Europe and back in the early 1970s, it exported gas to its neighbours. (And, indeed, the phrase "The Dutch Disease" was coined to describe what happened to a developed economy that became too dependent on primary energy exports.)
Natural gas production has fallen a long way since then, and now accounts for around a third of Dutch consumption.
Now, I have no problems with more oil & gas exploration. The Netherlands is a fairly small place, however, and that makes it unlikely that there are significant quantities of easily exploitable, undiscovered, oil & gas.
Discouraging the use of renewables (which is explicit VVD policy), therefore, basically means greater reliance on... Russia and the Middle East.
Whatever your views on global warming, this does not seem to be an optimal strategy for Dutch consumers.
There is also the issue that onshore gas can make your house fall down:
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
and people still think we should keep the monarchy...
We should remind him what happened to the first King Charles.
He didn't choose his name. although he could have chosen a different Regnal name. I think he did well in staying Charles despite the unfortunate fate of Charles I.
Charles III reign has been really quite good so far. Far better than expected given his unfortunate wife, and his sometimes unfortunate opinions. He's not getting everything right, but he's doing well. (PS I'm happy to accept any and all OBEs - If they're good enough for TBT, they're good enough for me)
Three sources familiar with the duchy’s expenditure confirmed the estate was using revenues collected from dead citizens to refurbish its profitable property portfolio, making considerable savings for the estate. One said duchy insiders regarded the bona vacantia expenditure, which has until now not been publicly disclosed, as akin to “free money” and a “slush fund”
and people still think we should keep the monarchy...
We should remind him what happened to the first King Charles.
He didn't choose his name. although he could have chosen a different Regnal name. I think he did well in staying Charles despite the unfortunate fate of Charles I.
Charles III reign has been really quite good so far. Far better than expected given his unfortunate wife, and his sometimes unfortunate opinions. He's not getting everything right, but he's doing well. (PS I'm happy to accept any and all OBEs - If they're good enough for TBT, they're good enough for me)
Charles has been lucky that expectations were so low. It's William that's going to have issues with delivery.
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
Just tried some quotes for my EDF renewal.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Our current monthly payment is up 130% compared to 2021 - at one point it was triple the 2021 payment.
Wow.
I mean, I don't want to go all Four Yorkshiremen on you, but get a grip lad!
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
Avro? OK for building Vulcan bombers in the 1950s. But mass market leccy?
I know, I know. Should have been suspicious they were selling knock-down price nuclear leccy, shouldn't I?
Probably couldn't get the ball-bearings out when it was nice and frosty.
Comments
Corbyn had a similarity in his lack of awareness about his idiocy, but knows very well the usefulness of his kowtowing to Britain's enemies.
All morons voted for Brexit ; You voted for Brexit ; therefore …
https://youtu.be/OGlFT060fVw?si=HIVLX-iV4oha1p8H
The Tories crowing about the inflation figures are thicker than Brexit voters!
So we were a bunch of Thickos who spent less money and STILL managed to beat you.
No wonder you feel shit.
My opinion on yesterday's Autumn statement is that Hunt and Sunak know the next election is lost, and they have decided to abandon investment in public services in favour of reducing the high tax burden, continue to upgrade benefits in line with inflation, confirm the triple lock, and challenge labour to declare which taxes they will raise to pay for the NHS insatiable financial demands, schools, and of course RAAC remedial costs, law and order, and everything else that needs billions of public investment
The taxes from non dom and vat on schools is petty cash in the wider context of the needs of public services, and I doubt that the amount needed is even politically possible to achieve, and the assumption labour will have more than one term in office might be a bit over optimistic
The covid crisis and war in Ukraine have taken a huge toll on UK finances, and the rest of Europe, and it is inevitable, despite the efforts of politicians to deny it, that everyone apart from the wealthy will be poorer for a considerable time to come
And on Brexit my wife and I voted remain but have accepted it is over and we have to work to attain a friendlier relationship but to those who see the EU as wonderful, I think that they may well be looking with considerable alarm at how many EU countries are moving to the right with unexpected consequences going forward
I am reminded though of infamous iain dale interview with nick griffin where he said ok lets put all the anti-immigration stuff to one side, what are your other policies....it was like Jeremy Corbyn on steroids....nationalise everything, government subsided this, that and the other.
Up by 70% since 2021.
Cleverness is a useful attribute in politics, as in life - but only if applied to judgement and empathy, both of which Cummings severely lacks.
If - for example - they linked it to university degrees then you are just tracking age.
What that says generally about cognitive ability and political choices, I leave to others to discuss. But I can say that US colleges and universities -- where cognitive abilities are higher than average -- are in serious trouble.
Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens
Exclusive: Assets of thousands of people in north-west England used to upgrade king’s property empire via archaic custom
‘He would turn in his grave’: the dead whose assets went to King Charles’s estate
How royal estates use bona vacantia to collect money from dead people
The king is profiting from the deaths of thousands of people in the north-west of England whose assets are secretly being used to upgrade a commercial property empire managed by his hereditary estate, the Guardian can reveal.
The Duchy of Lancaster, a controversial land and property estate that generates huge profits for King Charles III, has collected tens of millions of pounds in recent years under an antiquated system that dates back to feudal times.
Financial assets known as bona vacantia, owned by people who died without a will or known next of kin, are collected by the duchy. Over the last 10 years, it has collected more than £60m in the funds. It has long claimed that, after deducting costs, bona vacantia revenues are donated to charities.
However, only a small percentage of these revenues is being given to charity. Internal duchy documents seen by the Guardian reveal how funds are secretly being used to finance the renovation of properties that are owned by the king and rented out for profit.
The duchy essentially inherits bona vacantia funds from people whose last known address was in a territory that in the middle ages was known as Lancashire county palatine and ruled by a duke. Today, the area comprises Lancashire and parts of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Cumbria.
A leaked internal duchy policy from 2020 gave officials at the king’s estate licence to use bona vacantia funds on a broad array of its profit-generating portfolio. Codenamed “SA9”, the policy acknowledges spending the money in this way could result in an “incidental” benefit to the privy purse, the king’s personal income.
Properties identified in other leaked documents as eligible for use of the funds include town houses, holiday lets, rural cottages, agricultural buildings, a former petrol station and barns, including one used to facilitate pheasant and partridge shoots in Yorkshire.
Upgrades include new roofs, double-glazing windows, boiler installations and replacements of doors and lintels. One document references the renovation of an old farmhouse in Yorkshire, helping transform it into a high-end residential let. Another upgrade is helping turn a farm building into commercial offices.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/23/revealed-king-charles-secretly-profiting-from-the-assets-of-dead-citizens
Or maybe you don't have much cognitive ability.
But it is Thanksgiving here: Megan McArdle thinks Americans have much to be thankful for. For example:
"In 1900, about 44 man hours — or rather, lady hours — were needed each week to make the meals for a typical middle-class household and then clean up afterward.
. . .
"From your great-great-grandmother’s point of view, you live in a fairy story where an army of magical mechanical servants helps prepare the feast.
Your meal is also easier on the wallet. In 1915, Chicago grocers were advertising turkeys as low as 28 cents a pound, or about $8.35 a pound in today’s dollars — compared with the average $1.14 Americans pay today for a frozen bird ($2.05 for a fresh one). This is even more striking as a percentage of wages, which averaged $687 for a man in 1915, or about $20,500 in today’s dollars, and for a much longer workweek. Nor is this just some anomaly about turkeys; in that era, food consumed more than one-third of household budgets, compared with about 13 percent today."
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/22/thanksgiving-food-costs-delicacies-history/
Her argument would be even stronger had she mentioned that a much larger proportion of American families more than a century ago were living on farms, and raising much of their own food.
Leave was led by smart people but voted for by thickos*
That's right, isn't it?
*with exceptions, such as your good self, of course
I have increased my direct debit from £70 to £150
They did analyses controlling for other factors: "The individual level controls included age (in cubic form); gender; ethnicity, education; labour force status; interview mode; the number of sources used for information about news and current affairs; type of newspapers used for information about news and current affairs; political party supports/most aligned to; self-assessed general health; whether the respondent suffers from long-term health problems; and personality traits—Openness, Neuroticism, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness—measured using the short 15-item Big-Five inventory (BFI-15). The household level controls included the logarithm of monthly household income (adjusted by the OECD-modified equivalence scale and deflated by the Consumer Price Index); marital status; the number of dependent children in the household; the square root of household size; housing tenure; whether the respondent or partner is the household financial decision maker; lives in an urban location; and a set of region of residence dummy variables." They even did an analysis where they looked within couples who voted differently.
(In 2021 we had one of the too good to be true fixes, with Avro - your EDF fix was no doubt more expensive in theory, but may have been more prudent in practice)
James Cleverly admits calling Labour MP 'unparliamentary' word
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-67511542
This week, we have opened a new multi-faith area in the free waiting zone.
https://x.com/BristolAirport/status/1727651705309876546?s=20
You know that's going to get vandalized and you know exactly how it's going to get vandalized.
https://x.com/_inverse_square/status/1727678418529976692?s=20
I often hear people say they don't understand what 'British Culture' means. I think we can all agree this is a shining beacon of Britishness: The reflection of a guy in Hi Vis, the bollard placement, the use of a 'Smoking Shed' as a 'Multi faith area'. THIS is Britain.
https://x.com/danbarker/status/1727700157217599601?s=20
2:54 ...the Brits have been uniquely
2:58 incompetent in wallowing in
3:01 narcissistic irrelevance ever since the
3:03 brexit vote. They've refused to admit
3:05 that the only path forward for them is a
3:07 crippling deal with the United States
3:09 that will give them access to the NAFTA
3:11 system but at the cost of any sort of
3:13 economic sovereignity
3:13 until the Brits
3:15 accept that, Ireland is still the bridge
3:18 and so we're kind of in bonus-time, we're
3:20 kind of in a grace period right now. But
3:23 sooner or later the Brits are going to
3:24 bite the bullet [and] do what they need to do,
3:26 and then everything that has made
3:28 Ireland special from a geopolitical
3:30 point of view goes away almost overnight...
True? False? Silly?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1X7liBj-Tw
I am reminded of an incident - a group of Scandinavian professional gamblers I used to drink with (jokingly - a few quid) made some money on a mutual friend who had a perfect track record of picking losers on horse races.
The Duchy appears to be using it to improve the environmental footprint of its properties and/or bring old properties back into use. I am not convinced that the Treasury uses it as productively.
But in any event, it’s a little unpleasant of you to try and turn it into a personal attack on the King. This is a historical anomaly that know one has thought about in the past. I doubt he has particularly noticed it (you may have realised that the Duchy is overseen by a Cabinet Minister* appointed by the PM).
* autocorrect changed that to “Cabinet Mobster”…
During an IDF operation in the outskirts of Jabaliya, our troops found a large number of weapons and ammunition hidden under children’s beds and inside bedrooms, in a civilian building linked to a senior Hamas operative.
https://x.com/IDF/status/1727712108421280115?s=20
Cut to Jeremy Bowen....well its very common in the Middle East for kids to play with weapons from a very young age...
“Tracking age” just means there is a link. It doesn’t say which direction the relationship goes.
To spell it out in words of one syllable: Young people have more degrees. A greater proportion of young people voted for Remain. If they are saying that degrees = cognitive ability then, unless they control for age, their analysis is flawed.
Covid is stuffing the figures at the moment, but that won't last forever. If the cohort who came in 2022 haven't largely gone by 2026 it will be obvious we have a massive problem.
(Edit: As Bondegezou has helpfully pointed out, they measured cognitive ability directly, so your point is academic in a different sense.)
get wasted on high quality hashenjoy the culture of the Netherlands?How very sad and disappointing.
Edit: fwiw I suspect I would compare very favourably to you on pretty much any test of cognitive ability.
TLDR: they used cognitive in the Understanding Society longitudinal study (general purpose study widely used in social science and other population science) pre-Brexit. They controlled also for age and demographics, including employment status and income etc.
Doesn't mean the analysis isn't bollox, but on the face of it from a very quick skim it looks pukka enough.
But don't worry. That is the study, but if you don't like it, there are no doubt others.
I think you must have missed all the episodes where it was mentioned that the camouflage function had got stuck with the police box.
It may be true. But largely because the interests of those who work with their heads are more aligned with Remain; those who work with their hands more aligned with leave. Causation <> correlation, and all that.
P{S Bit of a bummer it being the 8 limbed ones that are so non-PC - if it was a squid bath toy you could cut off the two tentacles and call it an octopus.
There you go.
And
"Young people have more degrees. More young people gave their vote for In. If they say that degrees mean brains then, if they leave age out, their view is flawed."
I'm afraid 'degree/s' has to stay.
Next.
In the old days, the Netherlands was a big producer of natural gas; the Groningen field was one of the largest in Europe and back in the early 1970s, it exported gas to its neighbours. (And, indeed, the phrase "The Dutch Disease" was coined to describe what happened to a developed economy that became too dependent on primary energy exports.)
Natural gas production has fallen a long way since then, and now accounts for around a third of Dutch consumption.
Now, I have no problems with more oil & gas exploration. The Netherlands is a fairly small place, however, and that makes it unlikely that there are significant quantities of easily exploitable, undiscovered, oil & gas.
Discouraging the use of renewables (which is explicit VVD policy), therefore, basically means greater reliance on... Russia and the Middle East.
Whatever your views on global warming, this does not seem to be an optimal strategy for Dutch consumers.
Making some effort to understand that and then for politicians to respond to it would be a damn sight more useful. One day someone might actually get round to it.
Instead we get "oh they're all thickos" followed by "hooray!" when they vote the Tories out. And then they'll be ignored again.
But the scary thing is not "the EU", it is the election - and potential election - of politicians across the world who are openly hostile to Ukraine and sympathetic to Russia.
And we need to make sure that we do everything in our power to support Ukraine at this time.
As for the NAFTA membership: was that ever realistically on the table? UK seems to be doing if not well since Brexit then at least tolerably, and Brexit problems have been subsumed into Covid and demographic crises. IIUC nobody is currently even looking at it in UK.
NSC 87%
BBB 99%
Proportion of voters for those parties happy to have a coalition with Wilders.
As per prior thread I thought BBB voter fungibility would be high with PVV, surprised VVD is quite that high mind tbh.
Shellacking next time round for VVD and NSC if they conspire to keep Wilders out of government
As I have repeatedly said, often in words of one syllable, the UK had a great deal of influence over the EU's policy in eastern Europe and our absence from the bloc assisted its wet lettuce response. Even if I'm wrong, Iraq shows we have always been perfectly capable of breaking ranks. Brexit was, and continues to be, a geopolitical shitshow for the EU and UK defended only by the hard of thinking.
Nevertheless, congratulations on persuading most of the country and yourselves this fuckup was a great idea and continuing with that delusion as opinion polls continue to show the scales falling from the eyes of most.
Or indeed any king named Charles. From Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
https://www.dutchnews.nl/2021/06/between-rubble-and-rebirth-overschild-residents-greet-unequal-rebuild-with-frustration/
So they are having to close productive gas fields for reasons other than cost and climate change. Hooray for offshore, I suppose.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/23/bbc-own-reporters-accuse-it-of-favouritism-towards-israel/
Charles III reign has been really quite good so far. Far better than expected given his unfortunate wife, and his sometimes unfortunate opinions. He's not getting everything right, but he's doing well. (PS I'm happy to accept any and all OBEs - If they're good enough for TBT, they're good enough for me)