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The LDs would do better at the election with Daisy Cooper as leader – politicalbetting.com

I dont know whether LD Leader Ed Davey is going to survive in the role till the general election but he hasn’t been helped by the recent focus on him.
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About 45 per cent of the 8,766 “kids” checked by border officials since the start of 2020 turned out to be adults.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25273358/migrants-pretending-kids-britain/
Its not just that the Post Office scandal is bad for Ed, its that its the only thing most people will now associate with him as there's been a complete vacuum of coverage for anything else.
Replacing him with Daisy Cooper is a good idea. I don't know much about what if anything she stands for, but she's a fresh face and telegenic and doesn't look like an invisible sidekick to Starmer.
What have the Lib Dems got to lose?
"Trouble at Post Office - Panorama - 17th August 2015"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3by7G0VQ3A
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/p02z27ft
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us
because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly
deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age
wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children
have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue
to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen
Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to
children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds
were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation
or detention in only three months.
https://gmiau.org/age-assessments-2209/
Liking Anatomy of a Fall and Beef being recognised. 👍🏻👍🏻
Disliking Oppenheimer getting a round one for Direction. 👎
I’m not much a fan of Bear or Crown either 👎👎
Then again there were no stand out films in 2023.
https://x.com/filmwithyas/status/1744174184236777839?s=20
Ms Boebert is following the Ed Davey strategy: so long as they're talking about me...
https://fortune.com/2024/01/07/elon-musk-drug-use-worries-tesla-spacex-leaders-report/amp/
I’m not enjoying this, maybe I should put something else on.
“The conservative commentator set fire to two Barbie dolls in a scathing 43-minute video review of the film.”
It’s not that it tried to turn woke into an art form, though it did, it’s that it doesn’t make sense and is not even entertaining.
How can you live over there, the USA is nuts.
This charade is nothing more than a Master Plumber annual dinner, handing out gongs for any old pump installation. What an utter waste of time.
I think Ed Davey is quite good, he comes across as a senior politician. I have no problem with him, or his leading Lib Dem’s into election. He’s hardly been an electoral liability in recent years! Beware grass seeming greener on other side, political credibility quickly lost chopping and changing leaders.
seems to be just The Times trying to make out it’s only Lib Dem’s 100% responsible for the PO scandal - but it’s the Tories who have dominated politics for 14 years, so the heats coming for them too, for sure, which makes tomorrows Metro front page start of the problem for Rishi. Great Expectations now Rishi and his government are going to make all this good very quickly, or start to own it.
Lib Dems desperately need airtime and even BBC QT doesnt really give them a voice (not that its that important)....
I’m not a great Davey fan and would have preferred Layla Moran as leader. But he’s done ok and I don’t see the PO angle getting much traction outside the right-wing broadsheets. He has a hinterland and he comes across well. His strategy is boring and unimaginative but seems to be working.
Secondly, why should film industry gongs be a recognition of "art" any more than the plumbing industry awards you mention represent great plumbing for the ages? They are industry awards and are inevitably a reflection of sentiment in the industry at the time. The great movies achieve their recognition through longevity. My favourite example is the 1994 Oscar for best picture - the year of Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction - went to Forrest Gump.
I do tend to agree with El Capitano, though. I'm far from convinced by Daisy Cooper's appeal and, in practice, I don't think it's at all likely either.
First launch of ULA's new Vulcan rocket should hopefully happen in the next hour or so:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtPoAUuYXHo
And the official stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ6KTFMHenA
The rocket is carrying a small lunar lander:
https://www.astrobotic.com/lunar-delivery/landers/peregrine-lander/
My first day back at work in nearly three weeks.
That said there would be some confusion between Daisy Cooper and Daisy May Cooper.
My ★★★★½ review of Barbie on Letterboxd https://boxd.it/4J8OqB
Daisy Cooper is likely next leader of the LD, but a bit more experience would do her no harm. Not a disaster if she steps up early, while Davey takes a lower profile role.
Successful launch so far! Quite unusual for a maiden launch to be successful.
And well done to Blue Origin with their BE-4 engines, which power the first stage.
I think this is only the second methane-powered rocket to reach orbit.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
It was an entertaining kids movie, with funny bits for the adults too. What's not to like?
Media frenzy needs to pick a villain though, and they have picked on Davey. These things are often not fair.
“Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point.”
After Barbie had said “I’m not pretty anymore. I’m not ‘stereotypical Barbie’ pretty.”
What are the Lib Dems for and what do they want? Presumably not another penny on NI or whatever to "pay" for education again. There should be a good opportunity for them in this election with many Tories deeply scunnered of their party and yet underwhelmed by Starmer. They seem at serious risk of not taking it by having so little to say.
But better late than never, I suppose.
The LibDems just need to pitch pragmatism and internationalism. That’s where their votes are.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
This shouldn't be a Party political issue but I can't disagree with your implication that New Labour and later the LibDems are guilty of the most egregious miscarriage of justice the nation has ever seen.
One could argue that Ken Clarke was significantly more responsible for failing to act over the contaminated blood scandal - which destroyed even more lives. And despite that he is quite reasonably regarded as one if the better ministers of the last half century.
Davey was almost certainly misled by the PO and let down by civil servants.
Nonetheless, he was the responsible minister who missed a chance to halt a miscarriage of justice. I don't think there's any upside to his toughing this out - and if he acts promptly, significant benefit in stepping down, as a matter of both principle and pragmatism.
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Education used to be their thing and there is a lot to be said about it (ask @ydoethur ) but I have no idea what they are proposing. What do they have to say about our relations with the EU? Its not as if Labour is filling up the bandwidth on policy.
As a minor party they don't need lots of policies but they need a major topic where they seem to have something different to say. Davey has not provided that. Nor has anyone else in the party.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/07/post-office-suspected-of-more-wrongful-prosecutions-of-operators-over-horizon#:~:text=The Post Office is suspected,the Guardian has been told.
I don’t see the knives out for Davey on social media and in coverage of the PO scandal, certainly not yet. The Davey angle seems to be for the moment much more salient on here than elsewhere. That can of course change rapidly.
If it ought to have been obvious to Davey back in 2010, how much more so should it have been to succeeding ministers ?
The target audience next time are educated Home Counties home owners who mostly follow the news and who are shocked and worried at the poundshop populist party the New Tories have become under the malign influence of the lying clown. Steady Eddie will do just fine.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
Dad: it's an anagram. Your mum really loves Easter.
Boy: thanks, dad. Goodnight.
Dad: Goodnight, Alan.
Other old jokes are available.
"As the negotiations with ICL Pathway dragged on into the spring of 1999, further pressure was brought to bear on the UK Government by Fujitsu. Tadashi Sekizawa, chairman of Fujitsu, wrote to the Prime Minister in a without prejudice letter of 7 April 1999, claiming that Fujitsu would be required to make a provision in its accounts of approximately £300 million, unless a legally binding agreement for the future of Horizon was in place by 23 April 1999.
Mr Sekizawa warned the Prime Minister that neither ICL nor Fujitsu would be prepared to make any further investment in the development of the Horizon System if Fujitsu were obliged to make such a provision in its accounts, and expressed a hope that a resolution of the commercial negotiations could be reached. (Snip)
Mr Sekizawa's letter was followed by a meeting between the Prime Minister himself and Mr Michio Naruto, as I've said, the then Vice-Chairman of Fujitsu and chairman of ICL Plc, on 12 April 1999, in which a discussion took place relating to the future of the Horizon project, so within five days of the receipt of the Fujitsu letter. (Snip)
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/POH 11 October 2022.pdf
Some interesting stuff afterwards about the government's priorities...
This contributed to the story to the extent that the PO and Fujitsu limped on with a system originally configured for and designed around the benefits smart card project that was no more; IT experts suggest this is a reason why the system was over-engineered (in ways I don't really understand, except conceptually).
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
Better to be in power is the sensible view.
is a bit much - Afran is a year older than Luke Littler!
Hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jhM6a-cInc
I think it's AI. The whole thing. Including the person.