kle4 said:

From BBC
France Télévisions gives the National Rally between 120 and 160 seats - if that's correct then this is a surprise defeat for the RN, which would have come third.

Two other polls, including France's biggest private channel TF1 and from RTL/M6 suggest RN has come second. One other projection gives RN the biggest number of seats, but that may be an outlier.

Looks like the withdrawals and appeals to combine against the far right worked. But governing will not be easier.

Leon said:

kle4 said:

Roger said:

French exit poll expected.

Have the far right failed as expected?

What would be considered a failure? They had hopes of getting a majority after the first round, but would you consider being the largest party and a more than doubling of their seats a failure?

Not being the largest party surely would be a failure after the first predictions.

They’ve come THIRD. That’s definitely a failure

numbertwelve said:

So erm how do you get a government out of that?

Very embarrassing for RN though.

TheScreamingEagles said:

So Macron has played a blinder?

tlg86 said:

Far Left biggest bloc!

tlg86 said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

So Macron has played a blinder?

Err, no, he's put the pro-Putin left in charge.

TheScreamingEagles said:

So Macron has played a blinder?

TheScreamingEagles said:

So Macron has played a blinder?

Andy_Cooke said:

JosiasJessop said:

WildernessPt2 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

dixiedean said:

Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election.
Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252.
The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.

All figures net since 1945.

One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.

Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.

Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.

Ask Marcus Fysh.

A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".

Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.

On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ge4k
d8kl9o

He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party

Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh?
Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.

I didn’t say that.

It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be

Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.

There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?

The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.

But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.

The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.

But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.

What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?

It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.

The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.

I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.

There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.

I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.

Her own words:

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!

The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.

The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346

According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...

There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.

I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-united-kingdom-uk/

There's a lot talked about this, but Ed Conway (author of Material World, I book I heartily recommend to anyone) looked into this: https://edconway.substack.com/p/does-it-really-matter-if-we-cant

Key takeaways and apparent concerns that aren't:
- It'd probably make us less dependent on imports
- You certainly can make the top grades of steel in electric arc furnaces these days and the very best grades of steel made in Britain these days are made in electric arc furnaces rather than blast furnaces

Actual concerns:
- It's a very rapid and sudden shift and puts all our eggs into one basket (reversing our previous issue of being almost all-in on blast furnaces)
- Power costs here are high
- The most exciting new work on decarbonising steel production is occuring in Sweden with hydrogen DRI plants and the US with electrolysis

boulay said:

Leon said:

Roger said:

Leon said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

Leon said:

Omnium said:

Leon said:

Nous arrivons a Provence


Gotta say it does look quite fash-adjacent. This place could - understandably - vote Nazi in despair any moment

This trying to empathise with the French business will do you no good you know!

(Is there an any way similar website to PB in France? A mere echo though it must be of course.)

I’m in Menerbes. One of the plus nice villages de France. It is absurdly beaut

No riots….. YET

I studied and lived on the Cote D'Azur for three months. Filthy little dogs shitting everywhere. Watch where you're puting your Gucci loafers.

I’ve no intention of going to the coast. It’s vulgar and full of gangsters. And I might meet @Roger

You should. It's at it's sparkling best and full of people you'll recognise. Two exhibitions you might like. Bettina Rheims in Nice and Pasolini in Monaco. Bettina Rheims shows that Me2 doesn't apply to women and Pasolini......is just Pasolini. Then if you can wait the Tour de France ends in Nice on the 17th and the Olympic torch is wending its way from VF to Paris as I type....

I’ve done the Riviera many times. It’s nice if you like that sort of thing - and sometimes I do

But I’m here to do some actual flint knapping and a friend has kindly loaned me his little house in the lovely Luberon

Little known fact that Luberon is where KY Jelly was invented.

DM_Andy said:

That is the worst demi pie-chart that I've ever seen. Did France24 hire their data visualisation expert from the Lib Dems?

MisterBedfordshire said:

DM_Andy said:

That is the worst demi pie-chart that I've ever seen. Did France24 hire their data visualisation expert from the Lib Dems?

Makes it look like the exit poll results were doctored at the last minute to pretend Front Nationale are not heading for a majority so that the good and great can offload their assets before tbe markets twig on and implode..

Pulpstar said:

DM_Andy said:

That is the worst demi pie-chart that I've ever seen. Did France24 hire their data visualisation expert from the Lib Dems?

They clearly had the chart set up as a static picture anticipating slightly different results...

Looks like France will have have P Melenchon next time round

tlg86 said:

dixiedean said:

tlg86 said:

Far Left biggest bloc!

They aren't the Far Left though. They are the Left/Green Alliance.
Some of them are. Francois Hollande is a candidate, too.

Yeah, I'm sure you'd be as understanding if Sarkozy or someone was in an alliance with Le Pen.

Pulpstar said:

DM_Andy said:

That is the worst demi pie-chart that I've ever seen. Did France24 hire their data visualisation expert from the Lib Dems?

They clearly had the chart set up as a static picture anticipating slightly different results...

Looks like France will have have P Melenchon next time round

dixiedean said:

tlg86 said:

Far Left biggest bloc!

They aren't the Far Left though. They are the Left/Green Alliance.
Some of them are. Francois Hollande is a candidate, too.

williamglenn said:

tlg86 said:

Melenchon says they are in charge.

The market reaction will be interesting.

Andy_Cooke said:

JosiasJessop said:

WildernessPt2 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

dixiedean said:

Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election.
Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252.
The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.

All figures net since 1945.

One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.

Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.

Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.

Ask Marcus Fysh.

A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".

Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.

On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ge4k
d8kl9o

He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party

Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh?
Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.

I didn’t say that.

It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be

Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.

There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?

The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.

But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.

The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.

But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.

What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?

It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.

The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.

I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.

There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.

I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.

Her own words:

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!

The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.

The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346

According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...

There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.

I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-united-kingdom-uk/

There's a lot talked about this, but Ed Conway (author of Material World, I book I heartily recommend to anyone) looked into this: https://edconway.substack.com/p/does-it-really-matter-if-we-cant

Key takeaways and apparent concerns that aren't:
- It'd probably make us less dependent on imports
- You certainly can make the top grades of steel in electric arc furnaces these days and the very best grades of steel made in Britain these days are made in electric arc furnaces rather than blast furnaces

Actual concerns:
- It's a very rapid and sudden shift and puts all our eggs into one basket (reversing our previous issue of being almost all-in on blast furnaces)
- Power costs here are high
- The most exciting new work on decarbonising steel production is occuring in Sweden with hydrogen DRI plants and the US with electrolysis

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

dixiedean said:

Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election.
Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252.
The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.

All figures net since 1945.

One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.

Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.

Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.

Ask Marcus Fysh.

A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".

Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.

On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ge4k
d8kl9o

He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party

Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh?
Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.

I didn’t say that.

It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be

Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.

There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?

The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.

But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.

The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.

But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.

What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?

It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.

The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.

I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.

There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.

I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.

Her own words:

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!

The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.

The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346

According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...

What a flimsy straw man. Thatcher was rightly extremely concerned about the evidence of global warming, but it is leaping a vast logical chasm to suggest that she would therefore have consented to give up virgin steel-making capacity in Britain, especially given the fact that it has not reduced the quantity of blast furnaces in the world - huge extra capacity has simply been built in India, where environmental standards are lower, so net CO2 may well go up. So the move surrenders a key component of national security, for zero environmental gain.

Do I take it from your attempt to co-opt a dead Margaret Thatcher into agreeing with the closure of Britain's last blast furnace, and therefore our ability to sustain independent armaments production during a war scenario, that you are in favour of this move?

Her actions on CFCs show that she might well have taken some very hard decisions on such matters. I don't think the steelworkers saw her as a friend, do you?

I'm unsure why you're so obsessed with steelmaking in Britain. What 'alternate' websites have informed you about it? The same ones that made you shill for Putin over MH17?

Hahah - brilliant. Not enjoying this discussion very much ducks? Your rather drippy equivocation on a very simple national security concept, preserving a capability that every other Government from Atlee to Cameron to May has preserved, is very telling.

You're psychotically insistent on holding the PB-line against Mad Vlad, and very flamboyantly question where the loyalties of other people lie, but on something which is a real threat to our national security, you really couldn't give a toss.

Peter_the_Punter said:

MisterBedfordshire said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

Tweedledee said:

malcolmg said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Hmm.

Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/can-the-snp-recover-from-labour-landslide-d00rhcn0c

How many of us need to look at a map to find Stirling? Just me then.

Much of England

Can you find Hemel Hempstead?

Can anyone? It is more elusive than Milton Keynes.

There is a street called Paradise in Hemel.

As a boy I was taken once around Old Hemel, which was very pretty. Does it still exist?

Richard_Tyndall said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

So Macron has played a blinder?

Not sure. My understanding from most of the commentators is that the deal that Macron has had to make with the Far Left is one that undoes much of his last 7 years and will put him on a collision course with Brussels over public finances. Basically he is risking bankrupting the country to savage this result after his stupid unecessary election.

All this seems to do is make Le Pen more likely as President in a few years - if the analysis is correct.

Sean_F said:

Macron’s decision to call a snap election has proved idiotic.

Richard_Tyndall said:

JosiasJessop said:

WildernessPt2 said:

JosiasJessop said:

WildernessPt2 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

JosiasJessop said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

Luckyguy1983 said:

StillWaters said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

kle4 said:

DavidL said:

dixiedean said:

Another couple of amazing stats from this bizarre election.
Labour have never lost more than 91 seats at an election (2010). The Tories lost 252.
The Tories have never gained more than 96 (2010 again). Labour gained 239.

All figures net since 1945.

One of my pals put it this way: to get 5 far right MPs elected cost 250 centre right MPs. Not a great piece of business.

Now be fair at least a fifth of the Tory MPs were probably Reform curious at heart.

Let's see if they feel that way now they are unemployed.

Ask Marcus Fysh.

A former Tory MP who lost his seat in the general election says he has quit the party because "it's dead".

Marcus Fysh was Yeovil's MP but lost heavily to Adam Dance from the Liberal Democrats.

On X, the former minister said the current parliamentary composition of the party was "non-Conservative".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ge4k
d8kl9o

He’s a right wing nutter. I’m glad he doesn’t agree with the composition of the Conservative Party

Room in the 'broad church' for everyone except those with right wing views eh?
Surprise surprise. Like 'party loyalty', a concept that only applies one way.

I didn’t say that.

It was Fysh who was trying to define what the Conservative Party should be

Before the election, CCHQ tried to parachute a candidate into a seat who couldn't accept because they were already on the Lib Dem's candidates list. That's an extreme example of a selection process that stuff safe seats with ideological opponents to conservatism. It demonstrates a very profound issue that goes to the heart of the party's disunity and ineffectiveness in Government. The Tory Party used to be a lot more democratic, with local associations selecting MPs, a democratic right that they gave up in return for a say in the leadership, which CCHQ is also trying to take off them.

There does need to be a broad church, but everyone in that church should be motivated imho by a basic belief in the values of conservatism, however mild that form of conservatism might be. How else can they represent the interests of conservative voters?

The problem is that there *is* overlap between some of the parties in the centre, and you want that to be a hard-and-fast boundary. But without going to the NF or BNP, there is no boundary on the right. You want to truncate the broad church in the centre, but let any nutcase in on the far right.

But IMV the key word for Conservatives is the small-c word 'conservative'. Not no change, but careful and well-planned change, cautiously made. Progress by evolution rather than revolution.

The Conservative Party have forgotten that over the last decade.

But that notion is one of parties occupying a silly sort of space on left/right spectrum. A band that contracts, expands, and is pushed up and down like a pipe cleaner with the vagaries of politics.

What I'm arguing for is belief in a set of values and principles by which all political actions are measured. Is a law adding to the powers of the state against individual? Is a law or treaty in the national interest or against it? Is a law adding unduly to the tax burden? Will a law fundamentally undermine the security of the nation or its ability to defend itself? Is a law in the interests of families? Is a political action conducive to a strong, cohesive society? Is a law conducive to parliamentary sovereignty?

It isn't really about right and left, though those terms can be useful shorthand. A lot of the PCP, through design by CCHQ for reasons which I can't discern, doesn't pay more than lip service to those values, and sometimes not even that.

The issue is that the way those topics viewed can very much be in the eyes of he beholder, e.g. what is the national interest, especially if you take short- and long-term into account? They can also be contradictory. Is a slightly increased tax burden justified if that tax money is spent in the national interest? This treaty may slightly reduce national sovereignty, but also be in the national interest.

I think they're less ambiguous than you indicate. But they do come in and out of fashion.

There are fashionable weasel words that would justify the closing of Britain's virgin steel making capacity, dealing a knockout blow to our ability to manufacture armaments without importing the steel, based on amorphous envisaged future benefits of 'setting a good example' on CO2 emissions, but no true adherent to Tory principles could ever support such a scheme. Another Tory principle is that families and individuals spend their money better than the state. If adherence to these principles was widespread within the PCP, neither the party nor the country would be in the mess they are in.

I think Thatcher would have been thoroughly on board with reducing CO2 emissions. I think she was the first major world leader to take it seriously, along with CFCs and acid rain.

Her own words:

"For generations, we have assumed that the efforts of mankind would leave the fundamental equilibrium of the world's systems and atmosphere stable. But it is possible that with all these enormous changes (population, agricultural, use of fossil fuels) concentrated into such a short period of time, we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.

Recently three changes in atmospheric chemistry have become familiar subjects of concern. The first is the increase in the greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons—which has led some [end p4] to fear that we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climatic instability. We are told that a warming effect of 1°C per decade would greatly exceed the capacity of our natural habitat to cope. Such warming could cause accelerated melting of glacial ice and a consequent increase in the sea level of several feet over the next century. This was brought home to me at the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver last year when the President of the Maldive Islands reminded us that the highest part of the Maldives is only six feet above sea level. The population is 177,000. It is noteworthy that the five warmest years in a century of records have all been in the 1980s—though we may not have seen much evidence in Britain!

The second matter under discussion is the discovery by the British Antarctic Survey of a large hole in the ozone layer which protects life from ultra-violet radiation. We don't know the full implications of the ozone hole nor how it may interact with the greenhouse effect. Nevertheless it was common sense to support a worldwide agreement in Montreal last year to halve world consumption of chlorofluorocarbons by the end of the century. As the sole measure to limit ozone depletion, this may be insufficient but it is a start in reducing the pace of change while we continue the detailed study of the problem on which our (the British) Stratospheric Ozone Review Group is about to report.

The third matter is acid deposition which has affected soils, lakes and trees downwind from industrial centres. Extensive action is being taken to cut down emission of sulphur and nitrogen oxides from power stations at great but necessary expense."

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107346

According to you, Thatcher would not be a Conservative...

There is no other way to make commercial steel without coking coal (a heck of a lot of CO2). Anyone who says otherwise also has a Fusion reactor to sell you.

I'm unsure what point you're trying to make? Few people say we need *no* coal; otherwise heritage railways would be in serious trouble. But getting rid of coal-fired power stations from the 1990s onwards made a massive dent in our carbon emissions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/449503/co2-emissions-united-kingdom-uk/

We are talking about commercial steel and the closing down of a plant that makes virgin steel to replace it with one the recycles scrap steel. The virgin steel market is not decreasing in any way, but it just wont be getting made here.

We also do not mine iron ore any more (there are lots of traces of that industry, only recently gone, in the Northamptonshire area). So that needs importing as well for the true independence you desire. Fortunately we have oodles of limestone.

I'm ambivalent about the steel plant's closure. Ideally we'd keep it, bit I have little idea of the economics of it. If we did, we may be better off nationalising it as a national resource - not that British Steel did a stellar job...

Point of order. We stopped mining iron ore because in a globalised market we could get it cheaper from vast open cast mines in other parts of the word. There are still huge reserves of iron ore just as there are coal. Same goes for copper and tungsten (Devon has the 4th largest tungesten reserves in the world). These are economic and political decisions not resource availability decisions.

MisterBedfordshire said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

MisterBedfordshire said:

Peter_the_Punter said:

Tweedledee said:

malcolmg said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

Hmm.

Even in Dundee — the fabled “Yes City” — Chris Law clung on to the new Dundee Central constituency by only 675 votes. The SNP’s catastrophic result was “much worse than I thought in my darkest days,” one veteran said. “There is just shock among the entire party,” another insider said. The nationalists no longer hold any seats south of Stirling.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/can-the-snp-recover-from-labour-landslide-d00rhcn0c

How many of us need to look at a map to find Stirling? Just me then.

Much of England

Can you find Hemel Hempstead?

Can anyone? It is more elusive than Milton Keynes.

There is a street called Paradise in Hemel.

As a boy I was taken once around Old Hemel, which was very pretty. Does it still exist?

Sorry but I don't know.

We were visiting a place in Paradise which is in the new bit. I can confirm that the name of the street could be the dictionary definition of Oxymoron.

MisterBedfordshire said:

MattW said:

tlg86 said:

I think it's real shame Jess Phillips held on to her seat:

https://x.com/LBC/status/1809910681983959081

Completely in denial.

I think it's a good analysis - pointing out that a move to fringe stunts adjacent to violence is a practice across various campaign groups. It's stuff the likes of the SWP and eg some Islamists and the Far Right have been doing forever, and now it has the added attraction of viewers on social media.

Not all muslims are the same. Rowan Williams the late Archbishop of Canterbury and Ian Paisley (senior) were both Christians but almost totally different religions

We are very blessed that many Muslims in this country are Ahmadis who are wholly peaceful and non voilent. Wonderful people but regarded as heritics by militants.

And dare I say it that where there is trouble it is less to do with religion and more to do with a lot of little educated people from certain remote rural areas being brought in by the owners of declining mills, due to manual skills that enabled them to be (very) cheap labour and brought with them many customs that would not have been wholy unfamiliar to Thomas Hardy.

Some did extraordinarily well, but many ended up in virtual ghettoes with little attempt to bring them in to the mainstream and basically abandonment of them when the mills went bust a decade or two later. In such a siutation communities become insular.