Travelled from Totnes to London Paddington this morning - and in nearly three hours of train travel, never saw a single political poster.
What election?
Why would anyone expect to see political posters from a train anyway? The view from trains is almost entirely the back of houses, green and virtually uninhabited countryside - or HS2 construction works. Political posters go into front windows or onto stakes at front doors.
My station's on a line from Paddington too.. And I've scarcely seen a political poster from that line in 25 years. But walk the ten minutes from the station to our house, and you'll be inundated with LD and Labour posters in what's been a safe Tory seat throughout every voter's lifetime..
What makes this election different is the remarkable number of Labour posters (because boundary changes make a Labour win here dramatically less improbable than any other time this century) and the spectacular absence of Tory ones. Many of those Tory posters used to go into fields empty of any animals but cows - and the silent rebellion of Britain's tenant farmers against their Tory-voting landlords isn't a sign of apathy, but one more reason the Tories are about to be shellacked.
When the Tories have even lost the cows' vote, they are well and truly, er, burgered.
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
On the day that my long held prediction that: Biden is senile, it’s going to get worse, ignoring it is stupid and will end in disaster - has come spectacularly true (despite much mockery on here throughout) - this comment doesn’t really have the impact you hope
For some reason I am good at spotting random facts and quickly working out their inevitable consequences, meaning, end. I’m not sure why. I wonder if it’s because I’m good at plotting stories to tell my kids. That’s a form of extrapolation - the plot has to work
I am absolutely shit at turning this gift of historical-political extrapolation into money, which is quite frustrating
You do know that last night's debate, this forum, life in general is not just about you? Amazing though it may seem.
You are reminding me a bit of MoonRabbit who got the election month right and all of us who are tempted to think that because we made one good call we are suddenly God’s Gift to Political Betting. I called a Labour landslide long ago. It means diddly squat. Other things I’ve predicted have been crap. As have yours, like your prediction that Liz Truss was the Messiah.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I wish I'd known you could read Law after doing Science A levels.
Whatever else you read at Uni, you chose....wisely.
Back in the day I knew of a real w***** who read politics at Cardiff. What f****' use was politics?
Wastrel degrees like Sociology, Politics, Philosophy and Classics all need to be banned by the new Conservative Government next Friday as irrelevant to modern living.
I wish I could have read something practically useful like Media Studies. Back in my day many non-Law and non-Stem degrees were academic nonsense!
Presumably you are including PPE and Greats at Oxford in your anathema?
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
"On Wednesday Green was mainly canvassing previous Conservative and swing voters in Blackrod, a small commuter town with sweeping countryside views. Most of those who answered the door stated that they were undecided or would not be voting at all. “You haven’t got mine,” replied painter and decorator James Mullen, 73, when Green asked if he could count on his vote. “It’s all this betting.”
He recounted in disgust the scandal that has hit the Conservatives over the past fortnight, in which 12 individuals — including Tory candidates, party officials and police officers — have been placed under investigation over bets they placed on an early election date. "
Someone was writing about the scenario where if the LD’s were close to the Tories in seats and then a few Lab MPs defected so the LD’s had more seats that the Tories and so became the Official Opposition. Has this ever happened before, as in the opposition changing control outside of an election? Sorry if I missed it being mentioned before.
In that scenario the Tories would merge with Reform within a year unless we got PR
I imagine that is your hope. You will be with a group of intellectual equals I guess.
Reform has had something of a rebounce in today's polling, +2 with Deltapoll, +3 with WeThink and over 20 with Whitestone Insight, Tories desperately clinging on to 20. Scottish and Welsh polling makes a Scot/Wales wipeout possible for the Tories but I fancy they'll hold on in Berwickshire at least. Survations MRP update is due at some point, they said hopefully today but no update since
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
Can you present their comparative favourability ratings here, becuase I am not sure that Farage is hated more than Corbyn. I am open to info.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
I thought Land Economy was quite difficult?
You had to be a world class rower or the heir to a massive estate.
Well indeed, that massive intellect Gavin Hastings was an alumni of Cambridge with an MA(Cantab) (That is a BA anywhere else) in Land Economy.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Anybody who claims the a tide of political opinion in the medium or distant future going inevitably this way or that is talking out of their arse. There are no tides, there is no whig history or a bastard cousin thereof.
Anybody who wishcasts their own views as inevitable under the flimsy disguise of regret is trying to demoralise political opponents into inaction or anticipatory obedience: fight back against that shit.
Anybody who has to claim they are "extreme good at this" is trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else.
On the day that my long held prediction that: Biden is senile, it’s going to get worse, ignoring it is stupid and will end in disaster - has come spectacularly true (despite much mockery on here throughout) - this comment doesn’t really have the impact you hope
For some reason I am good at spotting random facts and quickly working out their inevitable consequences, meaning, end. I’m not sure why. I wonder if it’s because I’m good at plotting stories to tell my kids. That’s a form of extrapolation - the plot has to work
I am absolutely shit at turning this gift of historical-political extrapolation into money, which is quite frustrating
You do know that last night's debate, this forum, life in general is not just about you? Amazing though it may seem.
You are reminding me a bit of MoonRabbit who got the election month right and all of us who are tempted to think that because we made one good call we are suddenly God’s Gift to Political Betting. I called a Labour landslide long ago. It means diddly squat. Other things I’ve predicted have been crap. As have yours, like your prediction that Liz Truss was the Messiah.
Do please try and get over yourself.
Do please try to remember your own advice when you're matronising the site
Possibly the worst decision this court has made, and heaven knows it's been a utter shitshow since Trump's appointments. It's an enormous power grab by the Court at the expense of Congress, and demonstrates a contempt for the stare decisis doctrine that is deeper than the Dodds decision.
Kagan's dissent is well argued, and appropriately scathing. She made a point of reading it from the bench.
Does feel like the US is heading for an omnidirectional crisis where things just start breaking down because the institutions that knitted society together have become illegitimate or discredited. Which is very bad for the rest of us given how much America underpins the West's prosperity and security.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
I thought Land Economy was quite difficult?
You had to be a world class rower or the heir to a massive estate.
Well indeed, that massive intellect Gavin Hastings was an alumni of Cambridge with an MA(Cantab) (That is a BA anywhere else) in Land Economy.
AlumnUS, AlumnUS, even at Fenland ...
Indeed. Thankyou for your well placed and appropriate pedantry.
Tempers beginning to rise in an admittedly desultory way. Buckfast been opened? Which reminds me it's time to pack in the tax return and find out whether Mrs C wants Provencal rose or Cotes de Rhone with her hors d'oeuvre.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
I also got an offer of EE from UCL to study philosophy.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
I thought Land Economy was quite difficult?
You had to be a world class rower or the heir to a massive estate.
Well indeed, that massive intellect Gavin Hastings was an alumni of Cambridge with an MA(Cantab) (That is a BA anywhere else) in Land Economy.
AlumnUS, AlumnUS, even at Fenland ...
Indeed. Thankyou for your well placed and appropriate pedantry.
I don't think these attacks on Reform will work. The aim is to try and destroy them by revealing their 'true nature' but it just keeps getting shrugged off by Farage. So the attacks fail, and the by product is that the discourse is normalised. It feels like the overton window shifting.
Yes. There is a fashion on TikTok for young kids in France and Germany to say “yeah I’m a racist so fucking what”
The term has lost a lot of its negative power through overuse and now it has a kind of mildly transgressive chic - which kids love of course. That’s how you shock the elders these days. Say “yeah I’m a racist” on TikTok. Cue heart attack in your parents
Saying “fuck the toreeez” and going to Glastonbury is what people like @Heathener do
Again I don’t believe Britain will be immune from this trend, we are merely behind the curve
Is Britain ahead, behind or on a totally different curve? Time will tell. Brexit and Johnson gave the populist mad right wing nonsense thing a bad name with anyone under 50
My thinking is Brexit has delayed our swerve to the populist right - but not necessarily averted it. We gave people the vote and they vented their anger - that has bought us time
With that time we need to see a proper right wing government emerge that will actually do proper right wing things. Then maybe we can dodge the whole Le Pen shit altogether -
But if that doesn’t happen then it seems inevitable to me that we will follow Italy France Sweden the USA Holland etc
If you take the view that the Leave vote was motivated, at least in part, due to a portion of the electorate thinking immigration was too high, then, to borrow from T. May, nothing has changed.
This also explains why Reform are getting close to 20% in the polls.
Something tells me that whatever the Labour government will or won't be, it won't be tough on immigration. The question is whether or not the percentage of the population who are hopping mad about immigration tops out at 20% or so max, or continue to rise as problems like the housing crisis grows more acute.
I linked to a FT article that suggested an eightfold rise in middle aged renters by 2030. Figures are slightly suss, but there's already been a 20% rise in the last 11 years.
Build more houses and the housing crisis will dissipate.
Our population is growing at a pretty staid percentage not a massive one, demographic changes mean we need more housing with or without migration and migration obviously mean we need even more, but we need more either way.
The people who are absurd are those who want mass migration but no construction and no reform to our planning system as they support NIMBYism - that is a recipe for disaster.
But fix planning, let people build houses, and I couldn't care less how many migrants come to this country.
Every millionaire going off abroad is an opportunity for a developer to buy their large house in its grounds, flatten it and build lots of blocks of social housing flats as happened wholesale in Clapham Park (London SW12) after world war 2.
Indeed it induces their horrified wealthy neighbours to do the same starting a beneficial chain reaction.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
I could see a CON-REFORM deal to be the main opposition under those numbers.
Because bolting on a toxic bunch of racist wankers is just what a Conservative Party beaten black and blue by the voters needs.
Jeez....
The tories going to the "centre ground" will not get them anywhere.
It'll get them to Downing Street, when they eventually do it.
See David Cameron.
But they need to detox and appreciate why they lost first. And come up with sensible plans to fix the problems for voters who rejected them, not blame the voters.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Been happy?
Overrated, happiness. You get nothing done
Tho actually I am seriously happy right now sitting here in the sun drinking free wine on Ushant
It is quite entertaining to observe how Nigel Farage has the ability to drive people in to a total incoherant frenzy. He manages to make his opponents mad without actually doing anything significant. It isn't like he is calling his opponents 'scum', or saying that all debate should be stopped as it is 'hatred', as left wing politicians have done in the past few years. Regarding Reform supporters, it isn't like they are pulling down statues, vandalising ancient monuments, blocking ambulances etc. This all feels like the usual thing of a free pass for the far left but impossibly high standards applied to anyone on the 'far right'.
I loath the far left, but it may need pointing out to you that the far right,even just in this country, has set rather a lot more dangerous historical precedents than just pulling down statues. Fascism needs calling out. Yes there are lots of idiots who want to pretend that label doesn't apply to Farage, but the cap fits him very well.
Farage sees himself as doing a public service for democracy by representing a swathe of public opinion that the elite find repulsive. He brings it in to the political mainstream. That is what he did with Brexit and that is what he is doing now. Ultimately you have to choose between this and an actual far right/fascist situation. I would say though in addition that 'fascism' has really lost its meaning, it seems more like a rhetorical tool for debating purposes, if you can be branded a fascist then it is a red card, you are out of the game in disgrace. It all gets a bit tiring.
Not really, it has a meaning.
And Farage is one.
There is nothing wrong with honesty and it is free speech to call him what he is.
Free speech but hyperbolic and makes the word meaningless if done often enough.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Really, what has Sunak done to reduce inflation?
Well he was blamed for it when it was high, so I guess a reasonable person might say he should take some credit when it comes down perhaps? But then again, for good or worse, he only holds the office of PM!
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Where does the rumour of Sunak's maths 'till 18' ability come from? Has anyone ever challenged him, Countdown style, to do some maths? It's certainly not borne out by his career as Chancellor.
Many businesses would no longer exist if he hadn't intervened during the pandemic. With Hunt he has also done a pretty good job in stabilising things since the Truss clusterfuck and inflation is now in a good place. None of this is noticed of course, because the herd is not nuanced enough.
Really, what has Sunak done to reduce inflation?
Well he was blamed for it when it was high, so I guess a reasonable person might say he should take some credit when it comes down perhaps? But then again, for good or worse, he only holds the office of PM!
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
Yes I don't understand how the Reform vote is more inefficient than the tory one? Perhaps REFORM are building up votes in very safe Labour seats in the north especially in the North East.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
I could see a CON-REFORM deal to be the main opposition under those numbers.
Because bolting on a toxic bunch of racist wankers is just what a Conservative Party beaten black and blue by the voters needs.
Jeez....
A deal with a party that just called your leader a f...... p.... yeah, not happening
I was impressed by Sunak’s statement and wish the Beeb hadn’t bleeped out the words in the recording as a lot of people might not get how grim the slur was.
He was also good in the debate the other night. I will always wonder if he was told to not be himself earlier in the campaign and was managed badly and now is being more himself or if he was being himself earlier and now being managed to be punchy.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
There's a reason Cummings didn't let Farage anywhere near the front line during the Brexit campaign.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
Yes I don't understand how the Reform vote is more inefficient than the tory one? Perhaps REFORM are building up votes in very safe Labour seats in the north especially in the North East.
We will know at about 11pm on Thursday when Sunderland South result is up.
It is quite entertaining to observe how Nigel Farage has the ability to drive people in to a total incoherant frenzy. He manages to make his opponents mad without actually doing anything significant. It isn't like he is calling his opponents 'scum', or saying that all debate should be stopped as it is 'hatred', as left wing politicians have done in the past few years. Regarding Reform supporters, it isn't like they are pulling down statues, vandalising ancient monuments, blocking ambulances etc. This all feels like the usual thing of a free pass for the far left but impossibly high standards applied to anyone on the 'far right'.
I loath the far left, but it may need pointing out to you that the far right,even just in this country, has set rather a lot more dangerous historical precedents than just pulling down statues. Fascism needs calling out. Yes there are lots of idiots who want to pretend that label doesn't apply to Farage, but the cap fits him very well.
Farage sees himself as doing a public service for democracy by representing a swathe of public opinion that the elite find repulsive. He brings it in to the political mainstream. That is what he did with Brexit and that is what he is doing now. Ultimately you have to choose between this and an actual far right/fascist situation. I would say though in addition that 'fascism' has really lost its meaning, it seems more like a rhetorical tool for debating purposes, if you can be branded a fascist then it is a red card, you are out of the game in disgrace. It all gets a bit tiring.
Not really, it has a meaning.
And Farage is one.
There is nothing wrong with honesty and it is free speech to call him what he is.
Free speech but hyperbolic and makes the word meaningless if done often enough.
Not hyperbolic at all, unless you believe that the insurrectionist election denying Trump should not be described as such. Farage is a Trump supporting Putin apologist with a penchant for far right leaders including Marine La Penn. He is called out as a racist by the original founder of UKIP and was described as a fascist by his independent school house master.
Anyone that doesn't recognise Farage as a fascist is politically naïve, blind or a fellow traveller.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
I could see a CON-REFORM deal to be the main opposition under those numbers.
Because bolting on a toxic bunch of racist wankers is just what a Conservative Party beaten black and blue by the voters needs.
Jeez....
A deal with a party that just called your leader a f...... p.... yeah, not happening
I was impressed by Sunak’s statement and wish the Beeb hadn’t bleeped out the words in the recording as a lot of people might not get how grim the slur was.
He was also good in the debate the other night. I will always wonder if he was told to not be himself earlier in the campaign and was managed badly and now is being more himself or if he was being himself earlier and now being managed to be punchy.
This whole election is just grim. I can't wait for it to be done so we can deal with the new reality
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Did you mean bog standard
I was told ages ago that “Bog Standard” and “Dogs Bollocks” come from slang relating to early Meccano sets. There were two kits, one “Box Standard” and on “Box Deluxe”. Don’t know if urban myth but great if true.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
I could see a CON-REFORM deal to be the main opposition under those numbers.
Because bolting on a toxic bunch of racist wankers is just what a Conservative Party beaten black and blue by the voters needs.
Jeez....
A deal with a party that just called your leader a f...... p.... yeah, not happening
I was impressed by Sunak’s statement and wish the Beeb hadn’t bleeped out the words in the recording as a lot of people might not get how grim the slur was.
He was also good in the debate the other night. I will always wonder if he was told to not be himself earlier in the campaign and was managed badly and now is being more himself or if he was being himself earlier and now being managed to be punchy.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
It's a genuinely excellent question.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
It is quite entertaining to observe how Nigel Farage has the ability to drive people in to a total incoherant frenzy. He manages to make his opponents mad without actually doing anything significant. It isn't like he is calling his opponents 'scum', or saying that all debate should be stopped as it is 'hatred', as left wing politicians have done in the past few years. Regarding Reform supporters, it isn't like they are pulling down statues, vandalising ancient monuments, blocking ambulances etc. This all feels like the usual thing of a free pass for the far left but impossibly high standards applied to anyone on the 'far right'.
I loath the far left, but it may need pointing out to you that the far right,even just in this country, has set rather a lot more dangerous historical precedents than just pulling down statues. Fascism needs calling out. Yes there are lots of idiots who want to pretend that label doesn't apply to Farage, but the cap fits him very well.
Farage sees himself as doing a public service for democracy by representing a swathe of public opinion that the elite find repulsive. He brings it in to the political mainstream. That is what he did with Brexit and that is what he is doing now. Ultimately you have to choose between this and an actual far right/fascist situation. I would say though in addition that 'fascism' has really lost its meaning, it seems more like a rhetorical tool for debating purposes, if you can be branded a fascist then it is a red card, you are out of the game in disgrace. It all gets a bit tiring.
Crap. Farage is a racist bigot who earns his coin preying on the weak minded and stupid. supposedly representing their views stirring up trouble and dispute, giving some repulsive characters cover by supposedly saying the unsayable. I don't believe he believes half of what he says but the half he does is enough to condemn him in the minds of all right thinking people.
Farage is undoubtably a giant arse and everythin you say. However you miss the major point to vote for him.....labour tory lib dem aren't working like a vote for brexit what you are doing is stirring the pot and telling traditional parties they are not fit for purpose
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
It's a genuinely excellent question.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
I could see a CON-REFORM deal to be the main opposition under those numbers.
Because bolting on a toxic bunch of racist wankers is just what a Conservative Party beaten black and blue by the voters needs.
Jeez....
A deal with a party that just called your leader a f...... p.... yeah, not happening
I was impressed by Sunak’s statement and wish the Beeb hadn’t bleeped out the words in the recording as a lot of people might not get how grim the slur was.
He was also good in the debate the other night. I will always wonder if he was told to not be himself earlier in the campaign and was managed badly and now is being more himself or if he was being himself earlier and now being managed to be punchy.
Actually worse than HYUFD in full Onoda mode.
Haha. One day Lucky, you and I will sit over a glass of Sherry and reminisce about the glory days of Sunakism.
Boris Johnson fucked up in setting the post-Brexit income thresholds too low, which resulted in far more people coming than was anticipated.
His successors were then slow - very slow - to recognize this.
I find it astonishing that it wasn't recognized by either Johnson or Sunak (and his Home Secretaries) that numbers coming were way above forecast, and were resulting in much higher net migration than was the case when the UK was part of the EU.
And here Starmer is a very lucky General.
Firstly, higher income thresholds were put in place for visas. Now, you can argue that £38,700 is still too low (or alternatively that it is far too simplistic, given that a 21 year old earning £39k is very different to a 45 year old), but it is still almost 40% above the old threshold. That means that a very substantial number of people who were eligible for visas before, are no longer eligible. And it is Starmer who who will see the benefit.
Secondly, a large chunk of the increase in net immigration in the last three years has been student numbers. We've gone from 180k student (and dependent) visas issued a year to something like 600k. Based on experience most of those people will go home at the end of their courses. But there is an approximately three year period during which the number of students (and dependents) resident in the UK is rising fast. Once you get to the 3 or 4 year anniversary - and particularly if it is matched by smaller numbers of students coming - then the net impact falls dramatically.
Starmer, if he does absolutely nothing, will be Prime Minister, when net immigration numbers fall quite significantly. Because maths.
This is not true !!
The biggest increase was care workers and dependents
it was 100% deliberate and care organisations lobbied for care workers which made up the biggest amount of the immigrants
Remember this was announced in Dec 2021 after the other rules !!
Priti Patel, the home secretary, said the sector was “experiencing unprecedented challenges prompted by the pandemic”, adding: “The changes we’ve made to the health and care visa will bolster the workforce and help alleviate some of the pressures currently being experienced.”
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Reminds me of that story George Best used to tell about someone who walked in on him in a hotel as he cavorted with with two naked girls and drank Champagne. Shaking his head, the intruder said: "Where did it all go wrong, George? Where did it all go wrong?"
Best had incredible skill. Us mortals have to rely on luck. There is a hell of a lot to be said for knowing the right people and being in the right place at the right time. The trick then is to make the most of it.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
Yes I don't understand how the Reform vote is more inefficient than the tory one? Perhaps REFORM are building up votes in very safe Labour seats in the north especially in the North East.
We will know at about 11pm on Thursday when Sunderland South result is up.
I think Bridget Philipsson will help them be okay there. However Washington and Gateshead South might have more of a chance. If that goes to Reform early on, I could very well see people panicking on the Exchange etc.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Been happy?
Overrated, happiness. You get nothing done
Tho actually I am seriously happy right now sitting here in the sun drinking free wine on Ushant
Na, if you were happy, you wouldn't feel the need to boast to complete strangers. I have to say you do provide a most interesting psychological study.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
There's a reason Cummings didn't let Farage anywhere near the front line during the Brexit campaign.
Talking of the old psychopath, what's he up to these days?
Isn't his "I hate the Tories" party meant to be primed to go live at 10.01 next Thursday?
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
Yes I don't understand how the Reform vote is more inefficient than the tory one? Perhaps REFORM are building up votes in very safe Labour seats in the north especially in the North East.
We will know at about 11pm on Thursday when Sunderland South result is up.
I think Bridget Philipsson will help them be okay there. However Washington and Gateshead South might have more of a chance. If that goes to Reform early on, I could very well see people panicking on the Exchange etc.
In for a fiver on that one at 14-1. Labour can have a whopping majority and still give up the very fringes of their heartlands to Reform
I don't think these attacks on Reform will work. The aim is to try and destroy them by revealing their 'true nature' but it just keeps getting shrugged off by Farage. So the attacks fail, and the by product is that the discourse is normalised. It feels like the overton window shifting.
Yes. There is a fashion on TikTok for young kids in France and Germany to say “yeah I’m a racist so fucking what”
The term has lost a lot of its negative power through overuse and now it has a kind of mildly transgressive chic - which kids love of course. That’s how you shock the elders these days. Say “yeah I’m a racist” on TikTok. Cue heart attack in your parents
Saying “fuck the toreeez” and going to Glastonbury is what people like @Heathener do
Again I don’t believe Britain will be immune from this trend, we are merely behind the curve
Is Britain ahead, behind or on a totally different curve? Time will tell. Brexit and Johnson gave the populist mad right wing nonsense thing a bad name with anyone under 50
My thinking is Brexit has delayed our swerve to the populist right - but not necessarily averted it. We gave people the vote and they vented their anger - that has bought us time
With that time we need to see a proper right wing government emerge that will actually do proper right wing things. Then maybe we can dodge the whole Le Pen shit altogether -
But if that doesn’t happen then it seems inevitable to me that we will follow Italy France Sweden the USA Holland etc
So after 14 years of Tory government and the implementation of the totemic political project of the populist reactionary right, our next move must be to the populist reactionary right, otherwise we might swing too far to the right.
What an unwelcome prognosis (!) for anybody on the left or centre or centre right of politics, ie the majority of people. Have you checked with them? I bet you haven't. Because what I reckon they'd say, most of them, is how about we give good government a whirl first? It's been a while since we tried that.
This government have been populist in rhetoric only. In reality they have had the highest immigration and highest tax on record. And have sold off a ton of top notch British companies. It hasn't been populist in implementation. Not one bit. Until we get the implementation of populist right wing policies then Farage and co will remain ever present
Possibly. Because some people are thick.
BTW: Companies get sold. It is called international capitalism, and unless they are nationalised industries, the government doesn't do it.
I think it jolly well should. And in the days of the "Golden Share", we did. We should go back to it.
National capitalism is good. International capitalism: not so much. International capitalism would permit HMG to sell off the British people into slavery, as an extreme example, and let's face it they'd think about it. We need to stop selling stuff to foreigners: at the very very least make sure they set up a UK subsidiary.
Let's nationalise Tata Steel. Let's see them cart the steelworks off then. And if Tata complain, tough. The nation state should act in the interest of the people of the nation state.
Travelled from Totnes to London Paddington this morning - and in nearly three hours of train travel, never saw a single political poster.
What election?
The south west really do seem to have lost interest
Also, trains don't tend to travel down the middle of residential streets.
I went across about 15 miles of Somerset by bus last night (after the delayed and missed bus connection that ultimately resulted in someone (else) here calling for Glastonbury to be nuked in revenge for revellers poisoning eels with drug residue in their urine (or something like that)).
And saw the square root of diddly squat posters either. Just two orange diamonds, one green and a reform flag.
PS - Trains in the street are a total perversion and outrage crying out to Heaven for Venegance that dwarfs the outrage of Glastonbury revellers getting out at Castle Cary en masse holding up express trains to penzance stuck behind them. Oh Yes.
Bill Kristol @BillKristol · 4h The "it's too late" argument is false.
Biden withdraws, his delegates become free agents (as are the super-delegates), it's an open convention, someone else is nominated. Not something we're used to in the modern era? True. Worse than the path we're on. I don't think so.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
It's a genuinely excellent question.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
If Reform do get 20%+, expect they’ll sweep the board in South Essex, coastal Norfolk and Suffolk, and Lincolnshire.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
It's a genuinely excellent question.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
On the UKIP 2015 comparison, I was thinking about this today.
Back then you had: 1) The Tories promising a Brexit referendum, so it made sense for many to lend their votes to the Tories instead of UKIP. Now Brexit has happened and no major party is planning to reverse it - the Reform/Farage vote can go for their ‘preferred choice’ safely - especially because many see a Labour victory as inevitable.
2) The SNP much more popular in 2015 right now.
3) The Lib Dems in 2015 were much less popular than the current Lib Dems
4) Record migration figures making many turn to Farage
Those are just the ones that immediately come to mind but they all seem decent factors that could bolster the Reform vote vs UKIP 2015, and also, see the Tories do worse, turning many seats into LAB 1st REF 2nd
The Reform UK vote inefficiency will arise because first, 30% doesn't yield a much better probability of winning a seat than 10%. Second, the seats you win on 30% tend to have multiple rivals close to your vote, so your seats are vulnerable to two-party swings between your close rivals that have nothing to do with you. Finally, if the vote distribution is similar to Ukip in 2015, then even on 20% in England and Wales, they would only exceed 30% in a few dozen seats.
Farage claims Andrew Parker is an actor. Source = BBC radio 4 news at 6.
Old news. Either he or someone who looks very like him with the same name is a well spoken Equity Card Carrying actor who according to the Actor of the same names website which has a video has a speciality for "rough voice" Alf Garnettesque ranting and appears to have been in "rough voice" character when caught in Channel 4s sting.
Fargle helpfully linked to said website in a tweet this morning and is harvesting hay over it
I don't think these attacks on Reform will work. The aim is to try and destroy them by revealing their 'true nature' but it just keeps getting shrugged off by Farage. So the attacks fail, and the by product is that the discourse is normalised. It feels like the overton window shifting.
Yes. There is a fashion on TikTok for young kids in France and Germany to say “yeah I’m a racist so fucking what”
The term has lost a lot of its negative power through overuse and now it has a kind of mildly transgressive chic - which kids love of course. That’s how you shock the elders these days. Say “yeah I’m a racist” on TikTok. Cue heart attack in your parents
Saying “fuck the toreeez” and going to Glastonbury is what people like @Heathener do
Again I don’t believe Britain will be immune from this trend, we are merely behind the curve
Is Britain ahead, behind or on a totally different curve? Time will tell. Brexit and Johnson gave the populist mad right wing nonsense thing a bad name with anyone under 50
My thinking is Brexit has delayed our swerve to the populist right - but not necessarily averted it. We gave people the vote and they vented their anger - that has bought us time
With that time we need to see a proper right wing government emerge that will actually do proper right wing things. Then maybe we can dodge the whole Le Pen shit altogether -
But if that doesn’t happen then it seems inevitable to me that we will follow Italy France Sweden the USA Holland etc
If you take the view that the Leave vote was motivated, at least in part, due to a portion of the electorate thinking immigration was too high, then, to borrow from T. May, nothing has changed.
This also explains why Reform are getting close to 20% in the polls.
Something tells me that whatever the Labour government will or won't be, it won't be tough on immigration. The question is whether or not the percentage of the population who are hopping mad about immigration tops out at 20% or so max, or continue to rise as problems like the housing crisis grows more acute.
I linked to a FT article that suggested an eightfold rise in middle aged renters by 2030. Figures are slightly suss, but there's already been a 20% rise in the last 11 years.
Build more houses and the housing crisis will dissipate.
Our population is growing at a pretty staid percentage not a massive one, demographic changes mean we need more housing with or without migration and migration obviously mean we need even more, but we need more either way.
The people who are absurd are those who want mass migration but no construction and no reform to our planning system as they support NIMBYism - that is a recipe for disaster.
But fix planning, let people build houses, and I couldn't care less how many migrants come to this country.
Every millionaire going off abroad is an opportunity for a developer to buy their large house in its grounds, flatten it and build lots of blocks of social housing flats as happened wholesale in Clapham Park (London SW12) after world war 2.
Indeed it induces their horrified wealthy neighbours to do the same starting a beneficial chain reaction.
A million pounds won't buy you a three bedroom terrace in zone 2.
That's the problem.
A million pounds sounds like a lot of money, but in fact it won't buy you a family home in most of London and parts of the south east. Which is, of course, where most of the jobs are.
Yet up until the mid 1990s you could have bought those houses for 3x your annual salary in your 20s with a decent grad job.
Fast forward to 2024 and you have a ton of boomers sitting on £1m+ paper gains taxable at 0%, while anyone unfortunate enough to be born later than that can't afford a house, can't afford a family, can't save for a deposit, gets shafted by landlords and taxed out the wazoo by successive governments.
Generational inequality caused by a distorted housing market is the UK's #1 problem that won't be fixed, because to tackle it would be the dementia tax on steroids.
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
There's a reason Cummings didn't let Farage anywhere near the front line during the Brexit campaign.
The Vote Leave campaign was utter shambolic shit. Farage's Leave.eu campaign was far better, and Cummings' "5D chess" reputation for winning Brexit is entirely unwarranted. Vote leave probably cost the Leave campaign a far more convincing victory.
Bill Kristol @BillKristol · 4h The "it's too late" argument is false.
Biden withdraws, his delegates become free agents (as are the super-delegates), it's an open convention, someone else is nominated. Not something we're used to in the modern era? True. Worse than the path we're on. I don't think so.
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
It's a genuinely excellent question.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
If Reform do get 20%+, expect they’ll sweep the board in South Essex, coastal Norfolk and Suffolk, and Lincolnshire.
I agree, Sean.
Do you attach any significance to the fact that these places are highly vulnerable to tidal erosion?
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
You define intelligence by A level results 35 years ago? Even worse than IQ testing.
Very true. Look at our Leon; he was thrown out of school for making stuff up, with just a swimming certificate by way of paper qualifications, and now he has an IQ of 6000.
I went to a big standard comprehensive and became an alcoholic at the age of 17. Somehow I got an offer of two Es from UCL so I swanned in nonetheless. Once there I did zero work concentrating on drugs girls and parties and after that I became a heroin addict for another 15 years nearly dying many times. I’ve never done a proper day’s work in my life and here I am sitting in a sun drenched garden on the island of ushant drinking free muscadet where I am being PAID to have a lovely holiday on all the islands of Brittany because this is my second job - my first job which takes an hour a day earns me more than the prime minister thus giving me plenty of time to remember the 100 countries I’ve visited and the approximately 300 young women I have fucked and the tax bill I got one year for £300,000
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Been happy?
Overrated, happiness. You get nothing done
Tho actually I am seriously happy right now sitting here in the sun drinking free wine on Ushant
Na, if you were happy, you wouldn't feel the need to boast to complete strangers. I have to say you do provide a most interesting psychological study.
I think that's wrong, in my experience. Happiness leads to wanting to tell everyone all about it, even your imaginary friends on the internet. Misery, you tend to retreat more into silence.
"The implied national vote share from the MRP model placed Labour on 41.9%, Conservatives on 24.5%, Lib Dems on 11.3%, Reform on 11% and the Green Party on 4.9%. The SNP would receive 2.4% of the vote, and Plaid 0.6%, while other parties would receive a combined vote share of 3.3%."
Omg this poll is in line with pp Lab: 38% Ref: 21% Con: 18% LD: 11%
No idea if the Daily Express pollster is any good.
But Baxtered it gives something like
LABOUR 453 LD 74 CON 50 REF 29 (!) GREEN 3 SNP 18
The Tories have voters everywhere. Reform have voters everywhere. Reform are relatively unpopular in Scotland (8%), London, and fairly unpopular in the leafy shires. All those places probably have more Tories living in them as a percentage of their voter tallies than Reform do. So where does the inefficiency of the Reform vote lie? Where are they stacking up all these voters in unwinnable seats to beat the Tories soundly but still lose so heavily on seat count? Yes the Tories have ground game and incumbency, but that would surely be accounted for in the topline figures? Surely the RefUK vote actually has the potential to be quite efficient?
Yes I don't understand how the Reform vote is more inefficient than the tory one? Perhaps REFORM are building up votes in very safe Labour seats in the north especially in the North East.
That, and beating the Tories in former Tory seats in the Midlands/South where Labour has beaten both. And 2nd to the Tories in the seats mostly in the East where the Tories used to poll 60%+, and just hang on.
And 29 seats would be a better return than the Alliance managed in 1983 (23) with a higher vote share (26%).
skybet have a special on Corbyn and galloway both not to get elected at 11/8
Their own individual odds for these two are 7/4 and 2/1 against getting elected so I think the above is value - There is also perhaps some correlation in that both are "indies" against an established party .
Brexit Britain could benefit from a flight to safety from the political chaos engulfing the US and EU.
This will compensate for all the dynamic wealthy patriots who'll be leaving for Dubai due to Labour wokeness and high taxes.
Oh please don't tell me that you, as an accountant, agree with that twat who wrote in The Guardian that we should be pleased that wealthy people are leaving.
To alter the quote from Blackadder, many Labour voters brains are so minute , that if a hungry cannibal cracked one of their heads open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit.
Yes. On this we agree. Even by the standards of the Guardian, that was one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. “Hooray all the evil wealthy tax payers are leaving. The fact they are leaving and not willing to pay massive taxes PROVES they are evil so we should be glad they’re going”
Where do you even begin with an argument that dumb?
Don't get sick. Don't get old. As a certain Welsh Windbag said.
But that was said of the Tories. Labour's Britain is going to be a hell-hole of diminishing services if that "Eat the Rich!" mentality is as popular amongst the new intake as seems likely.
My worry is not that they’re all secret or even open Marxists. They’re not clever enough for that
And that is my worry. That they are dumb as rocks. All of them. At least you knew Blair was clever and perceptive and Brown had a massive if weird brain
These guys? Sometimes I wonder about starmer. I mean he must be bright because he made it to DPP. I wish he’d evidence it a little more. Yet he doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem. He never dreams. He speaks of himself in the third person. He has zero sense of humour and no idea of “telling a story”. If he’s intelligent it must be a highly narrow kind of intelligence
Says in Starmer's biography his A level grades were 2 Bs and a C. Now admittedly that included Maths and a Science which are more difficult and overall still clearly above average but does suggest he is hardly brain of Britain either.
Intelligence wise as PM he will probably be another John Major or Jim Callaghan with a bit more metropolitan flair but not a great cultural hinterland either
You really are an educational elitist.
Who cares if Mr Thickie Starmer is thicker than Mr Clever Sunak? Starmer has graduated from the school of hard knocks as a child of a tradesman.
If you believe the last sentence I have a bridge to sell you. And it is Sir Thickie if you don't mind.
He actually ended up graduating from the rather featherbedded St Edmund Hall Oxford via the perfectly respectable Leeds University. Essentially he is middle class by any measure, but the dinosaur class obsessed Labour Party want him to be seen as a working class lad. Laughable.
Excuse me. The class obsessed poster outraged at Starmer's mediocre higher education performance was not a member of the Labour party but a former Conservative councillor from Epping Forest.
Yes, but you've got to give him a bit of joy ffs!
I don't wish to be cruel, but seeing HYUFD pass judgement on people's youth-time educational attainment as though that were the only indicator of intelligence, reminds me of a fat bloke in our pub who goes on about the England players not being fit enough.
I am not running to be PM, nor is the fat bloke in the England team. That is the job they are highly paid for.
I also never said Starmer was thick but he is clearly not going to be in the top rank of our PMs by intelligence. Intelligence isn't the be all and end all for PMs, judgement, empathy and competence matters too but it helps
But you supported Boris Johnson, the most stupid PM in my vast political memory, had Liz Truss not come long to make him look moderately clever. And I know, he went to Oxford. What did he do at Oxford? Classics. Sounds rather clever doesn't it, and even if you don't want to imagine that he might have been accepted in the way described in Porterhouse Blue, it should be remembered that only a tiny percentage of A-level students, even in those days, studied Latin and Greek. It was, and still is, I believe, the easiest subject area to gain access to Oxbridge colleges other than Land Economy.
It was Boris who beat Corbyn, Boris who got Brexit done and had Boris still been leader the Tories would not be heading for near annihilation but would be on 200 seats+ with Reform well under 10% still. We therefore would have a pro Ukraine leader of the right still, not a surging Farage and his Putin apologies. The markets would not have reacted so badly to Truss' budget either as there would have been no Truss budget and no PM Kwarteng.
So no I make NO apologies for backing Boris with his Classics degree rather than Truss and Sunak's PPE degrees. Fat lot of good they did them!
Any muppet could have beaten Corbyn at that point, and just to remind you, you voted Remain. Boris Johnson was a liar and a law breaker; a Trump-lite who has been a disaster for the Tories and the country. It would have been so much better for everyone if Stanley had worn a condom.
No they couldn't, May failed to do so in 2017 and Hunt wouldn't have done either. Yes I voted Remain but I also respected the referendum result.
On current trends all removing Boris has done is increased tenfold the chances of PM Farage within a decade instead
God, you are so deluded. You said in a previous post that you are not applying to be PM. Let us just rejoice at that news.
You will probably get PM Farage within a decade instead as I said and thoroughly deserve it!
This country is never going to elect that fascist, racist and quite right so!
In a world where Trump is heading back to the White House potentially and where Le Pen's party is heading for most seats in the legislative elections on Sunday I would not be sure of that at all.
Farage is more charismatic than Starmer, if he takes over the rump Tories and the economy is poor under a Labour government he could become PM on just 30% of the vote if Reform overtook Labour
If Farage took over the Tories I'd expect Labour to top 50% in the following election, not let Farage win on 30% (not that he'd get it).
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
Corbyn got very close to winning in 2017 and got a hung parliament remember and Farage is more competent and ruthless than Corbyn was then.
Farage knows how to unite the right behind him and attract a crowd as Corbyn did for the left. Starmer however maybe centrist and decent but so was Theresa May and he is just as dull and uninspiring as she was
Farage claims Andrew Parker is an actor. Source = BBC radio 4 news at 6.
Old news. Either he or someone who looks very like him with the same name is a well spoken Equity Card Carrying actor who according to the Actor of the same names website which has a video has a speciality for "rough voice" Alf Garnettesque ranting and appears to have been in "rough voice" character when caught in Channel 4s sting.
Fargle helpfully linked to said website in a tweet this morning and is harvesting hay over it
I suspect this guy just hams it up playing an Alf Garnett character for his own entertainment rather than it being a set up.
Labour on Course to Win 470 Seats and Become the Largest Party in Scotland.
Probabilistic seat count:
LAB 470 CON 85 LD 56 SNP 12 RFM 4 PC 3 GRN 2
23,364 interviews conducted online and on the telephone Fwk 15th - 27th June
One third of seats are currently decided by fewer than 10 points, and 132 are decided by fewer than 5 points. In these seats, Labour leads in 65, the Conservatives in 47, and the Liberal Democrats in 10. Very small swings between now and the 4th July could have a dramatic influence on each party’s seat count.
Can we infer that, if tactical voting is higher than ever before, that makes all the difference as to who is LOTO?
Comments
You are reminding me a bit of MoonRabbit who got the election month right and all of us who are tempted to think that because we made one good call we are suddenly God’s Gift to Political Betting. I called a Labour landslide long ago. It means diddly squat. Other things I’ve predicted have been crap. As have yours, like your prediction that Liz Truss was the Messiah.
Do please try and get over yourself.
Farage is more vile and hated and Putinist than even Jeremy Corbyn and he will never win an election.
"On Wednesday Green was mainly canvassing previous Conservative and swing voters in Blackrod, a small commuter town with sweeping countryside views. Most of those who answered the door stated that they were undecided or would not be voting at all.
“You haven’t got mine,” replied painter and decorator James Mullen, 73, when Green asked if he could count on his vote. “It’s all this betting.”
He recounted in disgust the scandal that has hit the Conservatives over the past fortnight, in which 12 individuals — including Tory candidates, party officials and police officers — have been placed under investigation over bets they placed on an early election date. "
https://www.ft.com/content/80650fc4-5d36-4ee0-ad94-53731616f96d
Survations MRP update is due at some point, they said hopefully today but no update since
Imagine what I could have done if I’d worked hard like you
Let's have two new options.
Jeez....
Fortunately, Cambridge also let me in.
Indeed it induces their horrified wealthy neighbours to do the same starting a beneficial chain reaction.
See David Cameron.
But they need to detox and appreciate why they lost first. And come up with sensible plans to fix the problems for voters who rejected them, not blame the voters.
Tho actually I am seriously happy right now sitting here in the sun drinking free wine on Ushant
We'll put them down as Reform.
your mad statistic of the day is the amount of money raised by the Conservative Party in the first three weeks of election
figure is *one tenth* of the same period last time:
2019: £12m
2024: £1.2m
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-east/
Some actors are racists.
And the racist ones are attracted to Farage.
I wonder why? 🤔
He's treated the judge like shit. The judge should repay the compliment.
He was also good in the debate the other night. I will always wonder if he was told to not be himself earlier in the campaign and was managed badly and now is being more himself or if he was being himself earlier and now being managed to be punchy.
Anyone that doesn't recognise Farage as a fascist is politically naïve, blind or a fellow traveller.
Coefficient B, sample 810 LV
People will poo poo it but given just how many polls we have seen now where they are neck and neck, or Reform is ahead, it still looks value to me.
First question: are the UKIP and the Reform votes similar? UKIP got 13% of the vote in 2015, with very low shares in Scotland and London. (That said, pollsters are predicting that Reform get 8% in Scotland, so there's not *that* big a gap between their performance there and the rest of the country.)
Second question: is Reform likely to perform better in the old Red Wall, than in the Tory Shires?
Because what I suspect is happening right now is that the Conservative vote in the Red Wall has been absolutely hammered, with one in five of their voters going to Labour, and three in five going to Reform.
By contrast, in the Blue Wall, it's one in five off to LibDem/Labour and one in five off to Reform.
What this means is that Reform is clear second to Labour in the Red Wall, but doesn't win many seats. And Reform doesn't win that much in the Shires either.
The Conservative vote decline, by contrast, by being concentrated in the Red Wall, is quite efficient. They lose those seats, but they keep a fair number of the Blue Wall / shire seats.
My evidence for this is the Economist poll for Blackpool, which showed the Conservative vote decimated, with Reform soaring, but it not being enough to pass Labour (who also gained from the Conservative decline).
Do you attack farage and its supporters to try and make short term gains This is not true !!
The biggest increase was care workers and dependents
it was 100% deliberate and care organisations lobbied for care workers which made up the biggest amount of the immigrants
Remember this was announced in Dec 2021 after the other rules !!
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/24/uk-immigration-rules-to-be-ease-as-shortages-of-care-workers-worsen
Best had incredible skill. Us mortals have to rely on luck. There is a hell of a lot to be said for knowing the right people and being in the right place at the right time. The trick then is to make the most of it.
Isn't his "I hate the Tories" party meant to be primed to go live at 10.01 next Thursday?
Interesting point from WSJ — only way Biden’s big campaign war chest can be transferred to another candidate is if that candidate is Kamala Harris.
https://x.com/Survation/status/1806742442429088203?s=19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_share
National capitalism is good. International capitalism: not so much. International capitalism would permit HMG to sell off the British people into slavery, as an extreme example, and let's face it they'd think about it. We need to stop selling stuff to foreigners: at the very very least make sure they set up a UK subsidiary.
Let's nationalise Tata Steel. Let's see them cart the steelworks off then. And if Tata complain, tough. The nation state should act in the interest of the people of the nation state.
And saw the square root of diddly squat posters either. Just two orange diamonds, one green and a reform flag.
PS - Trains in the street are a total perversion and outrage crying out to Heaven for Venegance that dwarfs the outrage of Glastonbury revellers getting out at Castle Cary en masse holding up express trains to penzance stuck behind them. Oh Yes.
Bill Kristol
@BillKristol
·
4h
The "it's too late" argument is false.
Biden withdraws, his delegates become free agents (as are the super-delegates), it's an open convention, someone else is nominated. Not something we're used to in the modern era? True. Worse than the path we're on. I don't think so.
https://x.com/BillKristol
Labour on Course to Win 470 Seats and Become the Largest Party in Scotland.
Probabilistic seat count:
LAB 470
CON 85
LD 56
SNP 12
RFM 4
PC 3
GRN 2
23,364 interviews conducted online and on the telephone
Fwk 15th - 27th June
No odds on, must be 11-10 or greater.
Many thanks,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c88800k2njkt
Back then you had:
1) The Tories promising a Brexit referendum, so it made sense for many to lend their votes to the Tories instead of UKIP. Now Brexit has happened and no major party is planning to reverse it - the Reform/Farage vote can go for their ‘preferred choice’ safely - especially because many see a Labour victory as inevitable.
2) The SNP much more popular in 2015 right now.
3) The Lib Dems in 2015 were much less popular than the current Lib Dems
4) Record migration figures making many turn to Farage
Those are just the ones that immediately come to mind but they all seem decent factors that could bolster the Reform vote vs UKIP 2015, and also, see the Tories do worse, turning many seats into LAB 1st REF 2nd
Fargle helpfully linked to said website in a tweet this morning and is harvesting hay over it
That's the problem.
A million pounds sounds like a lot of money, but in fact it won't buy you a family home in most of London and parts of the south east. Which is, of course, where most of the jobs are.
Yet up until the mid 1990s you could have bought those houses for 3x your annual salary in your 20s with a decent grad job.
Fast forward to 2024 and you have a ton of boomers sitting on £1m+ paper gains taxable at 0%, while anyone unfortunate enough to be born later than that can't afford a house, can't afford a family, can't save for a deposit, gets shafted by landlords and taxed out the wazoo by successive governments.
Generational inequality caused by a distorted housing market is the UK's #1 problem that won't be fixed, because to tackle it would be the dementia tax on steroids.
So the young must suffer.
Do you attach any significance to the fact that these places are highly vulnerable to tidal erosion?
Lab 42
Con 25
Ref 11
LD 11
Green 5
SnP 2
PC 1
And 29 seats would be a better return than the Alliance managed in 1983 (23) with a higher vote share (26%).
Their own individual odds for these two are 7/4 and 2/1 against getting elected so I think the above is value - There is also perhaps some correlation in that both are "indies" against an established party .
Farage knows how to unite the right behind him and attract a crowd as Corbyn did for the left. Starmer however maybe centrist and decent but so was Theresa May and he is just as dull and uninspiring as she was
One third of seats are currently decided by fewer than 10 points, and 132 are decided by fewer than 5 points. In these seats, Labour leads in 65, the Conservatives in 47, and the Liberal Democrats in 10. Very small swings between now and the 4th July could have a dramatic influence on each party’s seat count.
Can we infer that, if tactical voting is higher than ever before, that makes all the difference as to who is LOTO?