This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
It's interesting, isn't it that it's the complete opposite in our sporting stars?
There is a dissertation in that somewhere. "We want physical prowess to be the product of effort, but intellectual and social prowess to be effortless. Why is that, and is it the product of societal conditioning? Discuss."
I've no answer to that question but I'd love to read the paper if it was ever published.
That is the English Public School cult of amateurism. A cult that has not served the country well.
Contrast it with the culture of hard work of my Presbyterian ancestors. Anything worth doing should require effort, persistence and strength of character.
There is more to Britain than English Public Schools, despite their dominance of so many sectors.
Indeed. One of the baleful effects of the English class system. Of course there is self interest in this the poshos can sail through on connections and dont have to work so hard. Why not hobble the competition. If the uk becomes 2nd rate as a result ah well.
"As a schoolboy, the young Michael Heseltine mapped out his future. In his 20s, he would become a millionaire. In his 30s, he would become an MP. In his 40s, he would be on the Tory frontbench. By his 50s – between 1983 and 1993 – he would enter Downing Street."
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
I am against this. I am not convinced that 16 year olds are mature enough for the vote. They will have a lifetime of voting after they turn 18.
People love to slam the Tories for allegedly using voter ID to suppress votes against them. Will they slam this as a naked attempt to garner more youth votes for Labour? One man’s gerrymandering is another’s increasing the democratic franchise…
Isn't this always the problem with political wheezes. Its easy to see a thumb on the scale as righting the wrongs of past injustice, until the electorate turns and now you're staring down, votes for 16 year olds, curtailing postal voting and automatic enrolment on the electoral register.
Will the Conservatives actually be able to fill all these vacant seats? And even if they can, will they be able to vet all the candidates to try and filter out as many fruit loops as possible?
They'll have war gamed it at the 'snap election' meeting the weekend before he announced So yeah. The drama over it is entirely press manufactured. Constituencies will have been told 'is your shortlist ready' etc? And if not then they'll have central list guys and gals imposed. It's been reported for weeks/months how many likely to stand down
Ditto Labours 100 vacancies
A few omaras might sneak through of course
Speaking of war-gaming the snap election . . .
Last weekend I encountered a small gaggle of local GOPers assembled at one corner of a vest-pocket park, led by head of the 36th legislative district Republican Party. A group than can assemble comfortably in a rather small space.
Yet THEY had the sense to bring along a small tent, the kind that is basically a roof on four polls. So their leader as well as followers avoided getting wet (in any sense).
Yet the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, the successor of Pitt, Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher AND Truss, was less well served by HIS party organization!
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
If you drink irresponsibly, you could kill yourself or another. If you vote irresponsibly… well, it makes no difference because 60,000 other people are voting in your constituency. Individual votes are very diluted.
That’s a fair point, but I ask again, is this not simply the mirror of what the Tories did with voter ID? There is no burning reason to lower the age of voting, when you won’t do so for alcohol, and you must still attend school.
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
It's interesting, isn't it that it's the complete opposite in our sporting stars?
There is a dissertation in that somewhere. "We want physical prowess to be the product of effort, but intellectual and social prowess to be effortless. Why is that, and is it the product of societal conditioning? Discuss."
I've no answer to that question but I'd love to read the paper if it was ever published.
That is the English Public School cult of amateurism. A cult that has not served the country well.
Contrast it with the culture of hard work of my Presbyterian ancestors. Anything worth doing should require effort, persistence and strength of character.
There is more to Britain than English Public Schools, despite their dominance of so many sectors.
Indeed. One of the baleful effects of the English class system. Of course there is self interest in this the poshos can sail through on connections and dont have to work so hard. Why not hobble the competition. If the uk becomes 2nd rate as a result ah well.
Absolutely, we should stick to those titans of success who didn’t go to public school like May, Truss, Brown. It’s all down to schooling.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
No. Blair deliberately lowballed his objectives so that he could over deliver. The pledge card was very unambitious.*
Sunak has done the opposite. He bigger up his promises then failed to deliver them . Then wants re-election on the basis of those promises.
* somewhere I have one given to me personally by John Prescott, signed by him.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I think there’s a greater flaw in Leon’s story. He claims he has a friend, but if he had a friend, he wouldn’t have to bore us with his holiday snaps.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
Juries sat through months of evidence before convicting subpostmasters.
Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie Gove. Wallace. Javid. May. Redwood. Zahawi. Leadsom. Cash. Clark. (I could go on and on…) All stepping down. We are witnessing an absolutely massive changing of the guard. An historic loss of experience and memory - whatever the election result. The Conservative Party won’t be the same again..:. For good or ill
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
Juries sat through months of evidence before convicting subpostmasters.
I’ve liked this, but we’re the cases against subbies ever that long?
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
Are you going to lower the maximum voting age to exclude those in their dotage?
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
No. Blair deliberately lowballed his objectives so that he could over deliver. The pledge card was very unambitious.*
Sunak has done the opposite. He bigger up his promises then failed to deliver them . Then wants re-election on the basis of those promises.
* somewhere I have one given to me personally by John Prescott, signed by him.
Thing is, Blair could have completely changed the country, maybe not to my liking obviously, but had such a majority and backing he could have turned the UK into some social democratic scandi country. He didn’t because he knew really the English (purposely English not British) wouldn’t take it. Starmer with a massive majority could also do that. I don’t want it but at least it’s honest and makes a decisive change and direction. Why is it that the left if given the chance doesn’t do something radical with a massive majority?
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
It's interesting, isn't it that it's the complete opposite in our sporting stars?
There is a dissertation in that somewhere. "We want physical prowess to be the product of effort, but intellectual and social prowess to be effortless. Why is that, and is it the product of societal conditioning? Discuss."
I've no answer to that question but I'd love to read the paper if it was ever published.
I am not sure it is the opposite in sport - it depends more on personality than effort - For instance who was more liked Geoffrey Boycott or David Gower ? Seb Coe put in huge effort to get his medals but never really liked . Steve Davis was just hated in the 1980s and everyone liked Alex Higgins or Jimmy White
Yes but Boycott was still picked for England despite being disliked. If he was in a large uk corporation they would likely try and fire him. Massive difference.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
No. Blair deliberately lowballed his objectives so that he could over deliver. The pledge card was very unambitious.*
Sunak has done the opposite. He bigger up his promises then failed to deliver them . Then wants re-election on the basis of those promises.
* somewhere I have one given to me personally by John Prescott, signed by him.
After a certain actor was staying at a local hotel, I was given a card with a picture of Darth Vader on one side and the Green Cross Code Man on the other. In the middle was a very angry looking signature saying "Dave Prowse is Darth Vader!"
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
I am against this. I am not convinced that 16 year olds are mature enough for the vote. They will have a lifetime of voting after they turn 18.
People love to slam the Tories for allegedly using voter ID to suppress votes against them. Will they slam this as a naked attempt to garner more youth votes for Labour? One man’s gerrymandering is another’s increasing the democratic franchise…
Isn't this always the problem with political wheezes. Its easy to see a thumb on the scale as righting the wrongs of past injustice, until the electorate turns and now you're staring down, votes for 16 year olds, curtailing postal voting and automatic enrolment on the electoral register.
Labour thought devolution would neuter the SNP, for example.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
Are you going to lower the maximum voting age to exclude those in their dotage?
No because many old people don't have any such problems, and therefore the only way to do it would be to individually assess people, and I'm guessing hardly anyone is in favour of that.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
Are you going to lower the maximum voting age to exclude those in their dotage?
No because many old people don't have any such problems, and therefore the only way to do it would be to individually assess people, and I'm guessing hardly anyone is in favour of that.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Please let it be Liz. We need a little humour in this darkest of hours.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
If you drink irresponsibly, you could kill yourself or another. If you vote irresponsibly… well, it makes no difference because 60,000 other people are voting in your constituency. Individual votes are very diluted.
That’s a fair point, but I ask again, is this not simply the mirror of what the Tories did with voter ID? There is no burning reason to lower the age of voting, when you won’t do so for alcohol, and you must still attend school.
The voter ID issue was entirely confected. I don’t know what Labour’s motivations are here, but there are arguments why it’s good to involve more people in voting and this change has, one could argue, worked well in Scotland.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
It's interesting, isn't it that it's the complete opposite in our sporting stars?
There is a dissertation in that somewhere. "We want physical prowess to be the product of effort, but intellectual and social prowess to be effortless. Why is that, and is it the product of societal conditioning? Discuss."
I've no answer to that question but I'd love to read the paper if it was ever published.
That is the English Public School cult of amateurism. A cult that has not served the country well.
Contrast it with the culture of hard work of my Presbyterian ancestors. Anything worth doing should require effort, persistence and strength of character.
There is more to Britain than English Public Schools, despite their dominance of so many sectors.
Indeed. One of the baleful effects of the English class system. Of course there is self interest in this the poshos can sail through on connections and dont have to work so hard. Why not hobble the competition. If the uk becomes 2nd rate as a result ah well.
Absolutely, we should stick to those titans of success who didn’t go to public school like May, Truss, Brown. It’s all down to schooling.
Yes sure lets have old etonians like Boris over Thatcher. Dont bother to work too much why not leave it to the plebs. The uk of 2024 is the result.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Sorry if that doesn’t make sense, trying to type something sensible whilst singing along to “live it up” By mental as anything. Should be a test, if you can still make your point whilst one hit wonder Aussie bands are ringing in your ears then you are ok.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
No. Blair deliberately lowballed his objectives so that he could over deliver. The pledge card was very unambitious.*
Sunak has done the opposite. He bigger up his promises then failed to deliver them . Then wants re-election on the basis of those promises.
* somewhere I have one given to me personally by John Prescott, signed by him.
After a certain actor was staying at a local hotel, I was given a card with a picture of Darth Vader on one side and the Green Cross Code Man on the other. In the middle was a very angry looking signature saying "Dave Prowse is Darth Vader!"
I fear I win.
Prescott was signing and handing out pledge cards as fast as he could all campaign. I don't think mine is unique!
An interesting little political momento from my Labour years. I took a weeks leave to go canvassing in Loughborough that election. It being the target seat locally. It was a very professional and slick campaign, even a script of the day each morning to keep us on grid and on message.
I left Labour in 2004, but that campaign was great fun. A real sense of achievement as seat after seat fell. I stayed up way past Portillo.
Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie Gove. Wallace. Javid. May. Redwood. Zahawi. Leadsom. Cash. Clark. (I could go on and on…) All stepping down. We are witnessing an absolutely massive changing of the guard. An historic loss of experience and memory - whatever the election result. The Conservative Party won’t be the same again..:. For good or ill
I'm sure the Conservative party has quite a list of approved potential candidates, but there is approved and approved and the balance may have moved from candidates fighting to get selected to decent candidates having their choice of seats. It might be beneficial if the Tories didn't win too many seats to ensure only the best are elected.
On a sour note I am embarrassed to say I am sorry to see Gove and Redwood standing down as I would have liked watching them lose their seats which in both cases was a possibility. I am really not proud of having those thoughts.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Iraq was in his second term.
Don't mistake me for a Labour or Blair apologist. One of the prime reasons I've never voted Labour was because of Iraq. But the idea that Labour didn't do much from 97-01 is incorrect. I like some of it, and I hate some of it, but it was a pretty iconic, transformative policy era.
I just went thru my personal characteristics to see if I could legitimately put myself forward as a Conservative candidate. Despite some sincere leanings towards the centre-right, particularly regards crime, the military and defence, I rapidly concluded that they would not accept me. Which may be a bit of a pity.
Which personal characteristics ruled you out?
The two biggest were a belief in redistributive taxation and a reluctance to accept the whip system. I'm basically too, what's the word, investigative(?) to take a whip: I'd want to read everything first and vote against it if i disagreed. They would be within their rights to reject me simply on that basis.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
The evidence against Letby was not just statistical. There were eye witnesses of suspicious behaviour. There were her handwritten notes to herself, there was the stolen medical records and other mementoes, etc.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
If you drink irresponsibly, you could kill yourself or another. If you vote irresponsibly… well, it makes no difference because 60,000 other people are voting in your constituency. Individual votes are very diluted.
That’s a fair point, but I ask again, is this not simply the mirror of what the Tories did with voter ID? There is no burning reason to lower the age of voting, when you won’t do so for alcohol, and you must still attend school.
The voter ID issue was entirely confected. I don’t know what Labour’s motivations are here, but there are arguments why it’s good to involve more people in voting and this change has, one could argue, worked well in Scotland.
There is an issue around voting, but it’s mainly abuse of postal votes. That said I think you should have to prove you are who you say you are when you vote, but Inwould accept either the polling card or your ID. Many countries require ID, so it’s not an unusual thing. And worked well in Scotland - for whom? How do you define worked well?
Well at least Gove was on the right side of the Brexit divide, unlike that chancer Cameron.
Except he wasn't. That was the oddest thing. Gove for years had been Eurosceptic because he blamed the EU for destroying his parents' fishing business. Then his father popped up and said it wasn't the EU, and he'd just retired. Gove's political philosophy (or at least that part of it) was founded on a misapprehension.
He was still on the right side of the argument even if for mistaken reasons.
IMV subsequent events have shown that Brexit was the wrong side of the argument. A divisive, pointless argument which has damaged the country.
I have a vague impression, perhaps wrong, that you will disagree with me on this...
Comprehensively. If it was divisive well, that is politics for you and that was as much because of those who would not accept the result as those who embraced it. And of course it certainly wasn't pointless as history will show. Nor do I believe it has damaged the country. It is the Tory party that has done that and they would still have been there being useless with or without Brexit.
I imagine there were many in North America claiming that American Independence was divisive, pointless and damaged the country. We don't remember their whining today.
One of the great “what ifs” of history, is to envisage a world where the revolt is put down.
Does slavery get abolished in 1833, or does the fight over slavery extend across the empire?
Does British America expand West? Would there be an American Indian State, perhaps becoming a British dominion?
Does South West America remain part of Mexico?
No. Yes.
Yes. No.
No.
I generally think there would not be the same sense of mission to expand West, on the part of colonial authorities, nor the same level of immigration.
Perhaps not same sense of mission, but something similar.
Note that after 1815, expansion of settlement into Upper Canada > Ontario was quite rapid, including significant number of overseas immigrants.
Further expansion of settlement and immigration from Ontario most went toward destinations further west, but into the US, not Rupert's Land > Northwest Territory, which remained a massive fir-trapping preserve as long as transportation links were limited to birchbark & similar, and there was land & opportunity available south of the border.
AND when railroads made the Canadian Northwest more accessible, first via US feeder lines then over the Canadian Pacific, there was another rapid expansion of settlement AND also mass immigration, both strongly encouraged by the express policy of federal governments of Canada both Grit (Liberal) and Tory.
Addendum - Forgot to say that, in both USA and Canada, process of settlement expansion and immigration was largely driven from the bottom up.
The top-down policy and activity of governments on both sides of the border being primarily a reflection of demands from the economy, demography and society of each emerging nation.
Manitoba being one example with respect to British North America > Canada.
I would very much doubt that the French would have sold the Louisiana territory to us in 1802 either.
Or even 1803.
Of course, a frontier between British America and French Louisiana would have been an obvious flashpoint (or rather many flashpoints) between Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars post-Amiens.
Though likely NOT a decisive theater re: the course of the conflict, which probably would have played out the same > British victory.
At which point, the question of Louisiana - in particular navigation on the Mississippi River - would have become an acute concern for British Americans west of the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains, for whom this would be a VITAL economic necessity.
Just like it was for non-British Americans in non-counterfactual reality.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
The evidence against Letby was not just statistical. There were eye witnesses of suspicious behaviour. There were her handwritten notes to herself, there was the stolen medical records and other mementoes, etc.
This. I was wary of a purely statistical basis and plenty of normal behaviour can appear suspicious with the knowledge that someone's accused of murder but that doesn't explain away the notes and the records.
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
The evidence against Letby was not just statistical. There were eye witnesses of suspicious behaviour. There were her handwritten notes to herself, there was the stolen medical records and other mementoes, etc.
I’m not disputing that, and I have no idea if she was guilty or not. But I do think it’s looking likely the stats used were hokey.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
I) Democracy is not a way of obtaining good government, it's a way of obtaining the consent of the governed. Ii) Since you can be in the Army at 18, and subject to the ultimate maturity test - should I kill this man with this rifle - the older limit obviously does not apply.
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Iraq was in his second term.
Don't mistake me for a Labour or Blair apologist. One of the prime reasons I've never voted Labour was because of Iraq. But the idea that Labour didn't do much from 97-01 is incorrect. I like some of it, and I hate some of it, but it was a pretty iconic, transformative policy era.
True but they could have been massively transformative, to the point we would be a vastly different country now (yeah ok we are in a different way) with a completely different approach to tax, education, etc etc. if Blair had said on day five “VAT on private school fees it would have happened then with a bit of grumbling from the surviving conservatives. He could have made massive NHS reforms, whatever but so much was tempered by not scaring the horses and making sure they won the next election.
If, for example, a massive majority Starmer gov went kamikaze and did major radical things I might not like the outcome but I would respect it that that’s what the electorate voted for but at present we just get a rubbish blancmange in the middle where the country isn’t right wing enough or left wing enough so gets the worst of both worlds.
I shouldn’t really give a shit as I don’t even live there but I do because I love Britain for some bizarre reason.
I just went thru my personal characteristics to see if I could legitimately put myself forward as a Conservative candidate. Despite some sincere leanings towards the centre-right, particularly regards crime, the military and defence, I rapidly concluded that they would not accept me. Which may be a bit of a pity.
Which personal characteristics ruled you out?
The two biggest were a belief in redistributive taxation and a reluctance to accept the whip system. I'm basically too, what's the word, investigative(?) to take a whip: I'd want to read everything first and vote against it if i disagreed. They would be within their rights to reject me simply on that basis.
Just tell 'em, that you'll do for them AND the party, what the great statesman Edmund Burke did for his constituents in Bristol and HIS party.
OR you could tell 'em, you'll do for them like Burke did for Warren Hastings!
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
Starmer gets the same try hard nonsense too. Reason: the tabloid jour
I think I shall put my name forward to become a Tory MP.
2024 - Become MP
2027 - Become Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition
2029 - Become PM after winning a landslide at the general election
I have it all mapped out.
Who do you envisage will do so poor a job as LoTO that you then succeed them after 3 years?
Pick one of Priti Patel, Kemi Badenoch, or Suella Braverman.
I reckon the they'd be lucky to make a total of three years consecutively.
At least we have answered the clarion of “more diversity”. We’ve discovered that, whatever party you support, it doesn’t matter if you are male or female, white, black, brown, you aren’t going to do a better job by your characteristic, everyone is equally shit or good (depending on your team). So let’s pick people on their qualities rather than their sex organs or skin colour.
We’ve had three female PMs, an Asian PM, an Asian Home sec, Chancellors, all colours and creeds in top positions - did their ethnicity make them better or worse? No, they were just politicians.
More women in top corporate jobs, Paula Vennels says “hold my beer”.
Women and ethnic minorities have proved they can be just as incompetent as white males.
I remember Miriam Gonzales saying, in front of her husband (I was never sure of this was a dig), that we’d know women were getting close to proper equality when rank female mediocrities who don’t work that hard get to the top of national life, rather than preternaturally talented and driven women. So on that score we’re definitely getting close.
Well at least Gove was on the right side of the Brexit divide, unlike that chancer Cameron.
Except he wasn't. That was the oddest thing. Gove for years had been Eurosceptic because he blamed the EU for destroying his parents' fishing business. Then his father popped up and said it wasn't the EU, and he'd just retired. Gove's political philosophy (or at least that part of it) was founded on a misapprehension.
He was still on the right side of the argument even if for mistaken reasons.
IMV subsequent events have shown that Brexit was the wrong side of the argument. A divisive, pointless argument which has damaged the country.
I have a vague impression, perhaps wrong, that you will disagree with me on this...
Comprehensively. If it was divisive well, that is politics for you and that was as much because of those who would not accept the result as those who embraced it. And of course it certainly wasn't pointless as history will show. Nor do I believe it has damaged the country. It is the Tory party that has done that and they would still have been there being useless with or without Brexit.
I imagine there were many in North America claiming that American Independence was divisive, pointless and damaged the country. We don't remember their whining today.
One of the great “what ifs” of history, is to envisage a world where the revolt is put down.
Does slavery get abolished in 1833, or does the fight over slavery extend across the empire?
Does British America expand West? Would there be an American Indian State, perhaps becoming a British dominion?
Does South West America remain part of Mexico?
No. Yes.
Yes. No.
No.
I generally think there would not be the same sense of mission to expand West, on the part of colonial authorities, nor the same level of immigration.
Perhaps not same sense of mission, but something similar.
Note that after 1815, expansion of settlement into Upper Canada > Ontario was quite rapid, including significant number of overseas immigrants.
Further expansion of settlement and immigration from Ontario most went toward destinations further west, but into the US, not Rupert's Land > Northwest Territory, which remained a massive fir-trapping preserve as long as transportation links were limited to birchbark & similar, and there was land & opportunity available south of the border.
AND when railroads made the Canadian Northwest more accessible, first via US feeder lines then over the Canadian Pacific, there was another rapid expansion of settlement AND also mass immigration, both strongly encouraged by the express policy of federal governments of Canada both Grit (Liberal) and Tory.
Addendum - Forgot to say that, in both USA and Canada, process of settlement expansion and immigration was largely driven from the bottom up.
The top-down policy and activity of governments on both sides of the border being primarily a reflection of demands from the economy, demography and society of each emerging nation.
Manitoba being one example with respect to British North America > Canada.
I would very much doubt that the French would have sold the Louisiana territory to us in 1802 either.
Or even 1803.
Of course, a frontier between British America and French Louisiana would have been an obvious flashpoint (or rather many flashpoints) between Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars post-Amiens.
Though likely NOT a decisive theater re: the course of the conflict, which probably would have played out the same > British victory.
At which point, the question of Louisiana - in particular navigation on the Mississippi River - would have become an acute concern for British Americans west of the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains, for whom this would be a VITAL economic necessity.
Just like it was for non-British Americans in non-counterfactual reality.
I like the fact that we used to share the Oregon territory with you. And then I cry over what we lost when we handed it over to you . All those amazing things in Oregon. Those great things. What is there in Oregon?
Didn't we point out earlier that Rishi's media staff hate him and his other staff aren't clever enough to stop the pitfalls being created..
Can we get onto actual policy please?
What is Sunak planning to do in his second term?
He has promised to do the things that he failed to deliver in his first term.
That's why he lacks credibility.
Isn’t that really what Blair did? Won a whopping majority, didnt do anything in the first term he should have done so not to risk the next election and vowed to do what he didn’t do in his first term. And yet he’s fondly reminisced about.
Too lazy, as always, to read the links but guessing it’s because he was more interested in spending billions killing Iraqi civilians than fixing the UK. If so I agree - he was a disgrace and wasted a golden legacy on a pointless disgraceful war, war crime really.
Iraq was in his second term.
Don't mistake me for a Labour or Blair apologist. One of the prime reasons I've never voted Labour was because of Iraq. But the idea that Labour didn't do much from 97-01 is incorrect. I like some of it, and I hate some of it, but it was a pretty iconic, transformative policy era.
True but they could have been massively transformative, to the point we would be a vastly different country now (yeah ok we are in a different way) with a completely different approach to tax, education, etc etc. if Blair had said on day five “VAT on private school fees it would have happened then with a bit of grumbling from the surviving conservatives. He could have made massive NHS reforms, whatever but so much was tempered by not scaring the horses and making sure they won the next election.
If, for example, a massive majority Starmer gov went kamikaze and did major radical things I might not like the outcome but I would respect it that that’s what the electorate voted for but at present we just get a rubbish blancmange in the middle where the country isn’t right wing enough or left wing enough so gets the worst of both worlds.
I shouldn’t really give a shit as I don’t even live there but I do because I love Britain for some bizarre reason.
I think not living here is perhaps the easiest way to love Britain.
Blair was a lot less cautious and tentative than people are suggesting. Starmer certainly will be cautious and tentative. Blair isn't a very good model to follow for imagining what this Starmer government, if that's what happens, will be like.
Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie Gove. Wallace. Javid. May. Redwood. Zahawi. Leadsom. Cash. Clark. (I could go on and on…) All stepping down. We are witnessing an absolutely massive changing of the guard. An historic loss of experience and memory - whatever the election result. The Conservative Party won’t be the same again..:. For good or ill
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
On the subject of the english class system this is disgusting from Boris but true to form.
NEW: Boris Johnson launches an attack on Keir Starmer in the Daily Mail
"He takes responsibility for everything that took place on his watch - except of course for the failure to prosecute the paedophile, necrophiliac and BBC superstar Jimmy Saville" 6:27 PM · May 24, 2024 · 308.9K Views
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Another part of perception, we somehow despise *effort*. Cf my ex, pointing out that to work at all was infra dig. This is part of the national consciousness, and probably explains generational unemployment in Jaywick as much as it does my well-heeled ex.
So Boris was lauded for being effortless, doing little work, delegating, being a bit of a buffoon, etc. Whereas Rishi, despite his many accomplishments is written off as a try hard. And believe me an MBA at Stanford is much more impressive and academically rigorous than Classics at Oxford.
Sadly it's the national culture, or national disease. To be seen to try is to be a bit of a loser, whether you're a working class kid in a sink school, or the next PM. And it explains a lot about the state this country is in.
It's interesting, isn't it that it's the complete opposite in our sporting stars?
There is a dissertation in that somewhere. "We want physical prowess to be the product of effort, but intellectual and social prowess to be effortless. Why is that, and is it the product of societal conditioning? Discuss."
I've no answer to that question but I'd love to read the paper if it was ever published.
That is the English Public School cult of amateurism. A cult that has not served the country well.
Contrast it with the culture of hard work of my Presbyterian ancestors. Anything worth doing should require effort, persistence and strength of character.
There is more to Britain than English Public Schools, despite their dominance of so many sectors.
Indeed. One of the baleful effects of the English class system. Of course there is self interest in this the poshos can sail through on connections and dont have to work so hard. Why not hobble the competition. If the uk becomes 2nd rate as a result ah well.
And of course Redditch is a microcosm of the English class system. There is real deprivation on the Winyates estate and yet noticeable affluence in Winyates Green. I couldn't believe it last time I went to the office in Moon Moat from the M42 at Portway I noticed they've only gone and demolished the Cross and Bowling Green at Beoley! What is the World coming to?
A good friend of mine is a very senior forensic psychiatrist employed by the Home Office/cops from time to time. As a consultant. He’s known to be brilliant
He’s personally reviewed the Letby case and he’s fairly sure she is innocent - not convinced, but he certainly has reasonable doubt
I have no dog in this fight. I assumed the conviction was watertight. He told me this over lunch just before Xmas. Disturbing"
Why would a forensic psychiatrist be able to assess evidence about how premature babies died?
The evidence against Letby was not based on her psychiatric state but on the non-natural causes of the deaths and that Letby was the only nurse who was present at the relevant times.
I've seen a number of middle aged men unwilling to believe Letby's guilt. They see the image of the pretty blond nurse holding up a babygro and forget that a jury sat through months of evidence to reach their conclusions.
I’ve not doubted her guilt until today when someone posted a link to some very serious flaws in the statistics used against her, something that was not reported at the time, and I suspect was not well contested in court. Never, ever underestimate just how poor the members of the public are at statistics, odds and probability.
I would be willing to listen to that, but far too much of the discussion around the case so far is thinking the middle class nice looking nurse can't be guilty, because she doesn't look the type.
Not on here it wasn’t. Discussed at some point this afternoon. I feel sorry for juries. Usually they won’t really have expertise in statistics, and have to judge based on what experts tell them. I was always suspicious of the cot death case, simply because cot deaths etc are likely to have genetic factors and it didn’t make sense to simply multiply the odds of one event twice, as they are not independent. And yet I have no doubt that Meadow believed what he was saying.
The evidence against Letby was not just statistical. There were eye witnesses of suspicious behaviour. There were her handwritten notes to herself, there was the stolen medical records and other mementoes, etc.
I’m not disputing that, and I have no idea if she was guilty or not. But I do think it’s looking likely the stats used were hokey.
Some crimes are so egregious it must be hard for the jury to decide if the defendant is either innocent or insane.
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
I) Democracy is not a way of obtaining good government, it's a way of obtaining the consent of the governed. Ii) Since you can be in the Army at 18, and subject to the ultimate maturity test - should I kill this man with this rifle - the older limit obviously does not apply.
The consent thing is actually a key* to good governance. It de-escalates the inherent violence between the governed and government. Power without consent is violence and can only be opposed with violence. Power with consent is contingent on maintaining that consent and therefore much more likely to be wielded in the interests of the governed.
Taking consent out of the equation for the section of society temperamentally most inclined to violence would be... brave.
*keys are not always used, but they are a necessary component.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
Is it theoretically possible to stop the general election at this point? Like, if Sunak just tore off his clothes and disappeared into the sea, could someone actually go to the palace and say "actually, don't dissolve parliament yet"?
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Will Sunak announce this weekend that he is not standing on 4th July and is withdrawing from the campaign? Must be tempting if the reason he's gone early is because he's completely pissed off with the whole thing.
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
I'm still waiting to see how he fancy his spreadsheets are.
Is it theoretically possible to stop the general election at this point? Like, if Sunak just tore off his clothes and disappeared into the sea, could someone actually go to the palace and say "actually, don't dissolve parliament yet"?
It would be rather embarrassing but there's nothing technically to stop it until Parliament is dissolved next Friday.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
I objected to people saying the football question was a gaffe. It clearly isn’t, unless you think no one ever watches tournaments when their team isn’t in it. Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Please let it be Liz. We need a little humour in this darkest of hours.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
I objected to people saying the football question was a gaffe. It clearly isn’t, unless you think no one ever watches tournaments when their team isn’t in it. Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
"it wasn't a gaffe" And yet when he jokingly asked - expecting enthusiasm - he received embarrassed silence. Which he then tried to laugh off.
Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧 @montie Gove. Wallace. Javid. May. Redwood. Zahawi. Leadsom. Cash. Clark. (I could go on and on…) All stepping down. We are witnessing an absolutely massive changing of the guard. An historic loss of experience and memory - whatever the election result. The Conservative Party won’t be the same again..:. For good or ill
Redwood stepping down ironically might keep Wokingham blue
Yesterday was the 29th anniversary of what I still regard as John Redwood Day. As SoS he was guest speaker at an event in South Wales. After he sat down an aid whispered something in his ear and suddenly he upped and left and the rest of us had get on with lunch without him. Turned out John Major had resigned the Tory leadership ('Back me or sack me') and within seconds Redwood was the train to Westminster to answer the siren call of ambition.
Is it theoretically possible to stop the general election at this point? Like, if Sunak just tore off his clothes and disappeared into the sea, could someone actually go to the palace and say "actually, don't dissolve parliament yet"?
Yes.
But outlandish.
Major civil emergency forces recall of prorogued parliament.
Well at least Gove was on the right side of the Brexit divide, unlike that chancer Cameron.
Except he wasn't. That was the oddest thing. Gove for years had been Eurosceptic because he blamed the EU for destroying his parents' fishing business. Then his father popped up and said it wasn't the EU, and he'd just retired. Gove's political philosophy (or at least that part of it) was founded on a misapprehension.
He was still on the right side of the argument even if for mistaken reasons.
IMV subsequent events have shown that Brexit was the wrong side of the argument. A divisive, pointless argument which has damaged the country.
I have a vague impression, perhaps wrong, that you will disagree with me on this...
Comprehensively. If it was divisive well, that is politics for you and that was as much because of those who would not accept the result as those who embraced it. And of course it certainly wasn't pointless as history will show. Nor do I believe it has damaged the country. It is the Tory party that has done that and they would still have been there being useless with or without Brexit.
I imagine there were many in North America claiming that American Independence was divisive, pointless and damaged the country. We don't remember their whining today.
One of the great “what ifs” of history, is to envisage a world where the revolt is put down.
Does slavery get abolished in 1833, or does the fight over slavery extend across the empire?
Does British America expand West? Would there be an American Indian State, perhaps becoming a British dominion?
Does South West America remain part of Mexico?
No. Yes.
Yes. No.
No.
I generally think there would not be the same sense of mission to expand West, on the part of colonial authorities, nor the same level of immigration.
Perhaps not same sense of mission, but something similar.
Note that after 1815, expansion of settlement into Upper Canada > Ontario was quite rapid, including significant number of overseas immigrants.
Further expansion of settlement and immigration from Ontario most went toward destinations further west, but into the US, not Rupert's Land > Northwest Territory, which remained a massive fir-trapping preserve as long as transportation links were limited to birchbark & similar, and there was land & opportunity available south of the border.
AND when railroads made the Canadian Northwest more accessible, first via US feeder lines then over the Canadian Pacific, there was another rapid expansion of settlement AND also mass immigration, both strongly encouraged by the express policy of federal governments of Canada both Grit (Liberal) and Tory.
Addendum - Forgot to say that, in both USA and Canada, process of settlement expansion and immigration was largely driven from the bottom up.
The top-down policy and activity of governments on both sides of the border being primarily a reflection of demands from the economy, demography and society of each emerging nation.
Manitoba being one example with respect to British North America > Canada.
I would very much doubt that the French would have sold the Louisiana territory to us in 1802 either.
Or even 1803.
Of course, a frontier between British America and French Louisiana would have been an obvious flashpoint (or rather many flashpoints) between Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars post-Amiens.
Though likely NOT a decisive theater re: the course of the conflict, which probably would have played out the same > British victory.
At which point, the question of Louisiana - in particular navigation on the Mississippi River - would have become an acute concern for British Americans west of the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains, for whom this would be a VITAL economic necessity.
Just like it was for non-British Americans in non-counterfactual reality.
I like the fact that we used to share the Oregon territory with you. And then I cry over what we lost when we handed it over to you . All those amazing things in Oregon. Those great things. What is there in Oregon?
LOTS of amazing things in Oregon. Even including some of the Oregoners! (But do NOT call them that.)
And YOU cry! Ever hear of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight"? US should have held out for the whole hog! But that damned James K. Freaking Polk gave up what's now "British" Columbia to please the Slaveocracy.
Heck, we're lucky JKP didn't throw in Puget Sound to sweeten this rotten (for USA) deal.
Another question - do Tory MPs who have announced they are not seeking re-election still count towards the 1922 total? Would their letters still count?
Sunak is having a long dark night of the soul and parliament has prorogued - not dissolved.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
I objected to people saying the football question was a gaffe. It clearly isn’t, unless you think no one ever watches tournaments when their team isn’t in it. Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
"it wasn't a gaffe" And yet when he jokingly asked - expecting enthusiasm - he received embarrassed silence. Which he then tried to laugh off.
How can you deny that it was a gaffe? Come on.
The implication is that no one in Wales is going to watch the Euros because Wales didn’t qualify so he shouldn’t mention football? Maybe the crowd just wasn’t into football.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Will Sunak announce this weekend that he is not standing on 4th July and is withdrawing from the campaign? Must be tempting if the reason he's gone early is because he's completely pissed off with the whole thing.
Wow that would be high drama. But not unthinkable I guess. I am already seeing a cataclysm of an election unfolding....
Labour is looking to introduce votes for 16 and 17-year-olds in its first year in government if it wins the election.
The party is closely studying how Scotland and Wales lowered the voting age and believes there is no reason why lowering the national voting age for general elections would need to take longer.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to extend the franchise to younger voters in September with no indication of how quickly the policy would be implemented should it win the election. Party sources now say that while there is yet no commitment that the policy will be in the King’s Speech, it is nonetheless expected to be enacted quickly. “I would be extremely surprised if it wasn’t in the King’s Speech,” one said, describing the legislation needed as “extremely straightforward”.
If they are also going to lower the age at which you can buy alcohol and leave school etc then fine. I’m not convinced you can declare that someone is old enough to discern and determine who can make laws and govern the country but can’t in their own lives discern and determine what legal chemicals to place in their bodies. I also presume that given the candidate age is aligned with the voting age that will drop to 16 too, which will allow for the possibility of some kid who’s barely started shaving getting elected to Parliament then having to absent themselves for the first 2 years whilst they finish compulsory education. Bonkers.
When I remember the poor decisions my friends and I made in our early 20s, I think they should raise the voting age to the level at which the average brain is fully mature, which seems to be in the mid- to late-20s.
I) Democracy is not a way of obtaining good government, it's a way of obtaining the consent of the governed. Ii) Since you can be in the Army at 18, and subject to the ultimate maturity test - should I kill this man with this rifle - the older limit obviously does not apply.
Our rules around who is an adult are not totally consistent. There is an argument they don't need to be but by and large I think they should. And given other trends my suggestion would be to raise ones like that, not lower the voting age. I just don't think we as a society generally treat 16 year olds as adults, and I think only adults should vote.
But I accept the fight as basically lost and once done I don't think it'll be changed back.
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Do you give Sadiq Khan the same credit?
Yes. I do
I admire Kahn for rising as far as he has from a humble background, it is genuinely creditable
I also think he is a terrible Mayor of London and want him gone. Likewise, I will not vote for Sunak, he's a rubbish PM
No, you have never ever written multiple paragraphs praising Sadiq Khan.
I don't think that's a given, is it? It really doesn't HAVE to be Dowden.
You are entering constitutional grey murk zone.
DPM doesn't really exist constitutionally. However, the existence of such a role kinda implies that should something happen to the PM the deputy is available.
I suspect that strictly speaking the Palace would expect the Cabinet to provide a single name as the person they would support as caretaker PM.
So if the Cabinet said bollx to Dowden it is Gove we want... then Gove would be caretaker PM until the "kissing of hands" (doesn't happen) of the new PM (he/she who almost certainly commands the House) on 5th July.
Edit: although actually the most likely thing is that Sunak hands resignation but remains caretaker PM until 5th. Pretty sure Palace would put huge pressure on that happening unless Sunak was too ill to continue or sadly actually dead. For all his faults he wouldn't flounce out and refuse to do six weeks as caretaker PM I think?
BREAKING: Sunak is going to take a day off the trail tomorrow in a highly unusual move so early in the campaign. He will spend it at home in talks with his senior aides. But the Tories insist this is NOT a campaign relaunch.
Another question - do Tory MPs who have announced they are not seeking re-election still count towards the 1922 total? Would their letters still count?
Sunak is having a long dark night of the soul and parliament has prorogued - not dissolved.
So there is still time for Andrea Leadsome...
There is no capacity to arrange a vote, noone is at parliament. And Brady has checked out, he wont be checking his mailbox again
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Do you give Sadiq Khan the same credit?
Yes. I do
I admire Kahn for rising as far as he has from a humble background, it is genuinely creditable
I also think he is a terrible Mayor of London and want him gone. Likewise, I will not vote for Sunak, he's a rubbish PM
No, you have never ever written multiple paragraphs praising Sadiq Khan.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
I objected to people saying the football question was a gaffe. It clearly isn’t, unless you think no one ever watches tournaments when their team isn’t in it. Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
Sometimes a population just needs a cathartic moment. Out with the old in with the new. Particularly after the trauma of a pandemic and a decade and a half of stagnation. Incumbents around the world are discovering that.
Thankfully we’re a democracy so that happens in elections not in bloody revolutions.
BREAKING: Sunak is going to take a day off the trail tomorrow in a highly unusual move so early in the campaign. He will spend it at home in talks with his senior aides. But the Tories insist this is NOT a campaign relaunch.
Maybe he's got an important silicon valley job interview he needs to prep for.
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Please let it be Liz. We need a little humour in this darkest of hours.
Ten Years to Save the Tory Party.
Slight correction - "Ten Years to Lettuce Save the Tory Party"
1) Peston: Senior Tories believe there will be an avalanche of Tory MPs announcing their retirement this weekend 2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
Rishi called this general election now so he better get on with it and lead his party through it not closet himself away!
And yet he *is* closeting himself away.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to plan his resignation plan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.
I objected to people saying the football question was a gaffe. It clearly isn’t, unless you think no one ever watches tournaments when their team isn’t in it. Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
Sometimes a population just needs a cathartic moment. Out with the old in with the new. Particularly after the trauma of a pandemic and a decade and a half of stagnation. Incumbents around the world are discovering that.
Thankfully we’re a democracy so that happens in elections not in bloody revolutions.
Can’t disagree with that, but a lot of stuff on here has been rather juvenile from some posters.
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
Do you give Sadiq Khan the same credit?
Yes. I do
I admire Kahn for rising as far as he has from a humble background, it is genuinely creditable
I also think he is a terrible Mayor of London and want him gone. Likewise, I will not vote for Sunak, he's a rubbish PM
No, you have never ever written multiple paragraphs praising Sadiq Khan.
Khan creditable
Khan good Tooting MP, apparently
There you go
“Write a sort of haiku praising a political enemy” is an interesting new artform.
Boris made me laugh Granted he’s also a c*nt But that’s still something
This is the worst election launch in British history, isn’t it?
I suspect if I’m completely honest it’s only us obsessives who are really paying any attention. At the moment I suspect most of the country are simply aware there’s an election coming and Sunak got rained on, and are probably looking forward to the bank holiday.
But yes, it’s been pretty bad.
Most people are focusing on Euro 2024!
But not so much in Wales (Rishi to note) 😈
If Rishi had mentioned the football in a factory in England then he would have been hammered for assuming everyone in the factory was English or Scottish so had a team in the tournament. How awful he is for not having the sensitivity that there are workers in factories that don’t support purely the teams who have qualified - see, he’s so out of touch. Just because your nations team isn’t in the tournament it doesn’t mean you can’t be looking forward to it. Or some such.
The coverage as a whole is symptomatic of how utterly fucking pathetic our media has become. Obsessed with comedy photo ops and 'gotcha' moments to clip for social media, and daft questions that provide nothing in terms of illumination. Woodward and Bernstein they ain't.
It was perfectly encapsulated yesterday morning on Today. The morning after the election being called on the flagship current affairs programme and the lead angle was that some Tory MPs were flabbergasted, annoyed etc. not that we were getting a general election, the general election everyone was calling for and what that meant for the country, the correspondents had been spending their time whatsappung and being briefed how annoyed MPs were.
It’s a fucking pantomime and the politics is crap because the people who are supposed to be holding their feet to the fire are too invested in the pantomime themselfves. It’s a lot easier to earn your money as a politics journalist by repeating gossip than actually analysing the crap politicians are saying because the journalists, like the politicians, have very rarely actually done anything else of note which would make themselves think, “hang on a minute, when I was working in the steel industry if a boss did this they would be fucked, etc”.
Everything about this turd of a nation is fucked. The politics, the media, the economics, the attitudes, the morality. The way the entire deck is stacked against anyone getting out of their box for a moment. And the slack jaws hose down their bread and circuses clapping like seals for any shit they are told to. We are in the last days of Rome. I like a rant. Cleansing.
If it's so awful here, why is this country one of the top destinations for people from all over the world?
If you are born into poverty in the uk, on average it takes your decendants 5 generations FIVE....to make it up to median income. Just across the water in Denmark where they give a shit about each other, it takes 2 generations. Why would you take initiative in the uk if you will never see the benefit, even vicariously through your children. Britain is a heartless society where everybody would rather nobody got anything out of worry that 1 person gets 50p too much. It is just so petty. These are our compatriots for christ sake. I hear a lot of talk, especially on the right, about loving your own country.... but as I see it, many many brits absolutely loathe their own cutbry and their compatriots. It is a very sad situation.
Indeed. See the contempt on this site for Rishi Sunak for his sin of having hard-working, hard-caring parents who spent every penny sending him to great schools, where he ALSO worked hard (head boy) and then got a really good lucrative job
What a wanker! How dare he! And an Indian! We like our minorities to be oppressed gang bangers who get wrongly shot by police while doing drug deals, thanks, so they don't get any uppity ideas about actually succeeding
He's done poorly as prime minister, failing on my terms, your terms, and even, damningly, his own terms.
But he was HEAD BOY. Fuck me, that turns it all around.
I know you don't like uppity immigrants and you prefer them to be shot by the Met Police so you can whine about it for ever in a middle middle class way that somehow satisfies you sexually, but this is Sunak's story:
"Sunak was born on 12 May 1980 in Southampton General Hospital in Southampton, Hampshire,[3][4] to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian Punjabi descent, Yashvir and Usha Sunak.[5][6][7] He attended Stroud School, a preparatory school in Romsey, and later studied at Winchester College as a dayboy, becoming head boy of the college.[8][9][10] He worked as a waiter in a curry house in Southampton during his summer holidays.[11][12] He read philosophy, politics and economics at Lincoln College, Oxford, graduating with a first in 2001.[10][13] During his time at university, he undertook an internship at Conservative Campaign Headquarters and joined the Conservative Party.[9] In 2006, Sunak earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Stanford University as a Fulbright Scholar.[13][14][15] While at Stanford, he met his future wife Akshata Murty, the daughter of Indian billionaire N. R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys.[16]"
His parents worked incredibly hard, he has worked incredibly hard. He has had the good fortune of being born very intelligent, but unlike some he has put it to good use, studying and working with great drive and eventually becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom as a second generation brown skinned immigrant. It is quite a remarkable story - as someone who is hugely skeptical of mass immigration, I personally would be much more in favour of it if every immigrant was like him or his family
You clearly feel different for your own sick perverse reasons. Well done
Is he a great prime minister? No. Is he a credit to himself, his family and the country they emigrated to? Yes
I’m glad at least. one other person on here has the guts to not follow the anti Sunak herd. Some of the bullshit posting about photos and asking about the football are just pathetic.
I don't dislike Sunak. He is just way out of his depth as PM and got promoted far too soon in almost everything in his life.
He has never had to learn from failure. Not until now anyway. It will be pretty devastating for him personally.
His parents are first generation Asian immigrants from East Africa. That right there is a handicap he had to overcome. He is also - let's face it - a short-arse, five foot six. I am pretty sure he has had subtle ribbing all his life, at prep school and later on, I'd be surprised if he wasn't bullied - a tiny bright Indian kid - certes
Despite all that he became head boy at Winchester, got a First at Oxford, and then became a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford and got an MBA. And married a billionaire woman. This speaks of quite a driven, notably clever, and very hard working and charming man - also honest and tee-total. How can this not be exemplary? What would you prefer? That he failed a bit and did heroin? That he fucked up and joined the Mafia?
Honestly, there is a pathological streak on the Left which will only accept and praise BAME people if they are terrible failures and probably hen-fucking ket addicts. It's fucking weird
I live and work amongst East African Asian Doctors and Pharmacists!
One of the best things that the Conservatives ever did was support the move of East African Asians to Britain when Amin chucked them out.
I have great admiration for their culture of hard work and academic work, and they often do describe episodes of racism along the way.
But it is the simple truth that Sunak has led a gilded life. Prep School, Winchester College, a flat bought for him in London aged 22 for his first job in the City. Selected for a safe seat, and rapidly promoted. He has never had to experience the bitter taste of failure. Sure he has worked hard too, I have never denied that.
This is why he has been such a failure as PM. He has never had to learn to eat humble pie, to develop humility, or to listen to others advice on how to do better. So he doesn't know how. He might have been a decent PM if he had a decade in opposition rather than straight into government.
Is it theoretically possible to stop the general election at this point? Like, if Sunak just tore off his clothes and disappeared into the sea, could someone actually go to the palace and say "actually, don't dissolve parliament yet"?
As I understand it, the dissolution isn't happening until the 30th, because the date of the election is tied rigidly to the date of dissolution.
So, yes. The King would follow the advice of his ministers and not dissolve Parliament if he received such advice before then.
But I don't think it's remotely likely that Sunak will quit. If that was something he was considering then he would have simply quit as PM, rather than call an election.
BREAKING: Sunak is going to take a day off the trail tomorrow in a highly unusual move so early in the campaign. He will spend it at home in talks with his senior aides. But the Tories insist this is NOT a campaign relaunch.
Maybe he's got an important silicon valley job interview he needs to prep for.
Is it theoretically possible to stop the general election at this point? Like, if Sunak just tore off his clothes and disappeared into the sea, could someone actually go to the palace and say "actually, don't dissolve parliament yet"?
As I understand it, the disruption isn't happening until the 30th, because the date of the election is tied rigidly to the date of dissolution.
So, yes. The King would follow the advice of his ministers and not dissolve Parliament if he received such advice before then.
But I don't think it's remotely likely that Sunak will quit. If that was something he was considering then he would have simply quit as PM, rather than call an election.
No, I don't reckon it's likely. It was just a what-if in my head and I didn't know the answer.
Comments
https://chrishallamworldview.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/michael-heseltine-the-best-tory-prime-minister-we-never-had-2/
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1793038192892928503
Isn't this always the problem with political wheezes. Its easy to see a thumb on the scale as righting the wrongs of past injustice, until the electorate turns and now you're staring down, votes for 16 year olds, curtailing postal voting and automatic enrolment on the electoral register.
Last weekend I encountered a small gaggle of local GOPers assembled at one corner of a vest-pocket park, led by head of the 36th legislative district Republican Party. A group than can assemble comfortably in a rather small space.
Yet THEY had the sense to bring along a small tent, the kind that is basically a roof on four polls. So their leader as well as followers avoided getting wet (in any sense).
Yet the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, the successor of Pitt, Disraeli, Churchill, Thatcher AND Truss, was less well served by HIS party organization!
Did we do the WeThink poll?
Lab 47(+1)
Con 22(-1)
Ref 12(+1)
LD 8(-)
Green 6(-2)
SNP 3(+1)
Labour lead 25(+2)
https://wethink-strapi-k5d3.onrender.com/uploads/Voter_Intention_Tracker_240524_c766ac5719.png
Sunak has done the opposite. He bigger up his promises then failed to deliver them . Then wants re-election on the basis of those promises.
* somewhere I have one given to me personally by John Prescott, signed by him.
Tim Montgomerie 🇬🇧
@montie
Gove. Wallace. Javid. May. Redwood. Zahawi. Leadsom. Cash. Clark. (I could go on and on…) All stepping down. We are witnessing an absolutely massive changing of the guard. An historic loss of experience and memory - whatever the election result. The Conservative Party won’t be the same again..:. For good or ill
https://x.com/montie/status/1794104125057060962
Not all of this will be to everyone's tastes, but quite a lot happened, some of it pretty big:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Tony_Blair#First_term_(1997–2001)
2) Sunak quits the campaign and goes home to closet himself away with his closest advisors...
OK. So who becomes acting leader? Hunt?
I fear I win.
Obviously most pollsters still to report, so this could change.
https://scienceontrial.com/post/shifting-the-data#:~:text=The%20new%20shift%20data%20reveals,25)%20over%20the%20period%20investigated.
An interesting little political momento from my Labour years. I took a weeks leave to go canvassing in Loughborough that election. It being the target seat locally. It was a very professional and slick campaign, even a script of the day each morning to keep us on grid and on message.
I left Labour in 2004, but that campaign was great fun. A real sense of achievement as seat after seat fell. I stayed up way past Portillo.
On a sour note I am embarrassed to say I am sorry to see Gove and Redwood standing down as I would have liked watching them lose their seats which in both cases was a possibility. I am really not proud of having those thoughts.
Don't mistake me for a Labour or Blair apologist. One of the prime reasons I've never voted Labour was because of Iraq.
But the idea that Labour didn't do much from 97-01 is incorrect. I like some of it, and I hate some of it, but it was a pretty iconic, transformative policy era.
9/11 was a few months into Blairs second term.
And worked well in Scotland - for whom? How do you define worked well?
Something you don't see often. Prof John Curtice trying to explain why the exit poll was wrong, in 1992.
At 7 hours, 44 mins, 42 secs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4YY7KWJAtA
Of course, a frontier between British America and French Louisiana would have been an obvious flashpoint (or rather many flashpoints) between Britain and France during the Napoleonic Wars post-Amiens.
Though likely NOT a decisive theater re: the course of the conflict, which probably would have played out the same > British victory.
At which point, the question of Louisiana - in particular navigation on the Mississippi River - would have become an acute concern for British Americans west of the Allegheny and Appalachian Mountains, for whom this would be a VITAL economic necessity.
Just like it was for non-British Americans in non-counterfactual reality.
Ii) Since you can be in the Army at 18, and subject to the ultimate maturity test - should I kill this man with this rifle - the older limit obviously does not apply.
If, for example, a massive majority Starmer gov went kamikaze and did major radical things I might not like the outcome but I would respect it that that’s what the electorate voted for but at present we just get a rubbish blancmange in the middle where the country isn’t right wing enough or left wing enough so gets the worst of both worlds.
I shouldn’t really give a shit as I don’t even live there but I do because I love Britain for some bizarre reason.
OR you could tell 'em, you'll do for them like Burke did for Warren Hastings!
On another topic, an interesting thought:
https://x.com/psythor/status/1794127635204763997?s=46
Will that boost the SNP vote?
Blair was a lot less cautious and tentative than people are suggesting. Starmer certainly will be cautious and tentative. Blair isn't a very good model to follow for imagining what this Starmer government, if that's what happens, will be like.
NEW: Boris Johnson launches an attack on Keir Starmer in the Daily Mail
"He takes responsibility for everything that took place on his watch - except of course for the failure to prosecute the paedophile, necrophiliac and BBC superstar Jimmy Saville"
6:27 PM · May 24, 2024
·
308.9K
Views
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1794057756590157910
Dasvidaniya Comrade!
@Tomorrow'sMPs
@tomorrowsmps
·
1h
🔴RICHMOND & NORTHALLERTON (Lab target 343): Labour have picked Tom Wilson as candidate to stand against Rishi Sunak.
Taking consent out of the equation for the section of society temperamentally most inclined to violence would be... brave.
*keys are not always used, but they are a necessary component.
A few people on here have been unhappy with posts pointing incredulous ridicule at what has been a catastrofuck of a campaign - and we're only a few days in.
Having to quit the campaign to
plan his resignationplan a rethink / restart, a weekend where an avalanche of Tories will announce they are quitting does rather demonstrate that the moaners are wrong to object to such posts! Its mental, but its true.Quite frankly this site is currently dominated by those who want the Tories smashed, and seemingly spend all day looking for anything, anything that can be used to mock or sneer.
How about thinking about policies and how the parties might differ?
What if he quits?
Edit: Although he could quit as MP and yet remain PM until 5th.
And yet when he jokingly asked - expecting enthusiasm - he received embarrassed silence. Which he then tried to laugh off.
How can you deny that it was a gaffe? Come on.
But outlandish.
Major civil emergency forces recall of prorogued parliament.
MPs elect new PM who clearly commands the House.
New PM goes to the Palace...
And YOU cry! Ever hear of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight"? US should have held out for the whole hog! But that damned James K. Freaking Polk gave up what's now "British" Columbia to please the Slaveocracy.
Heck, we're lucky JKP didn't throw in Puget Sound to sweeten this rotten (for USA) deal.
Sunak is having a long dark night of the soul and parliament has prorogued - not dissolved.
So there is still time for Andrea Leadsome...
But I accept the fight as basically lost and once done I don't think it'll be changed back.
DPM doesn't really exist constitutionally. However, the existence of such a role kinda implies that should something happen to the PM the deputy is available.
I suspect that strictly speaking the Palace would expect the Cabinet to provide a single name as the person they would support as caretaker PM.
So if the Cabinet said bollx to Dowden it is Gove we want... then Gove would be caretaker PM until the "kissing of hands" (doesn't happen) of the new PM (he/she who almost certainly commands the House) on 5th July.
Edit: although actually the most likely thing is that Sunak hands resignation but remains caretaker PM until 5th. Pretty sure Palace would put huge pressure on that happening unless Sunak was too ill to continue or sadly actually dead. For all his faults he wouldn't flounce out and refuse to do six weeks as caretaker PM I think?
BREAKING: Sunak is going to take a day off the trail tomorrow in a highly unusual move so early in the campaign. He will spend it at home in talks with his senior aides. But the Tories insist this is NOT a campaign relaunch.
Khan good Tooting MP, apparently
There you go
Thankfully we’re a democracy so that happens in elections not in bloody revolutions.
Boris made me laugh
Granted he’s also a c*nt
But that’s still something
🔴 HENLEY & THAME: I'm told that almost as soon as she was announced, Alexandra "Ally" Aldridge-Gibbons stood down as Labour candidate.
https://x.com/tomorrowsmps/status/1794136508028559570
So, yes. The King would follow the advice of his ministers and not dissolve Parliament if he received such advice before then.
But I don't think it's remotely likely that Sunak will quit. If that was something he was considering then he would have simply quit as PM, rather than call an election.