One party having a majority of about 100, and being seen to fail, being followed by its rival doing exactly the same, could create some unpredictable results in 2029.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
The Labour peer at the centre of the donations row bailed out a baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Alli, a multimillionaire former banker and fashion entrepreneur, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin more than a decade ago to help her repay the expenses after the Lords authorities ordered her to refund the taxpayer.
Sir Keir Starmer would later announce that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran at the time, would not pursue fraud charges against her.
The Labour sleaze snake is now swallowing its own tail.
That's.... mind blowing
So the Generous Labour Lord, who underwrites the Labour PM's wife's designer panties, is also saving corrupt Labour MPs from the consequences of their own thievery
That "panties" ... oh dear.
You really are a certain type, aren’t you. I've met you so many times.
Heteresexual men with no doubts about that sexuality? Yes, you probably have. Not in the mirror, tho
"panties" ...
I once did a password crack run on our local users back in the early 2000s. Variations on the word 'panties' was the most common password.
The entire Labour government - in essence, the UK - has been bought by one Labour Lord. It's not like he's even that impressive. He's not a squillionaire like Musk or Bezos, he's only worth £200m
I have close personal friends that are worth considerably more than that. I might ask them to buy Spain for me, or maybe Greece plus Montenegro for the carp
It's not absolute wealth but spare or spending money that counts here. Many on PB could spend £10,000 or £100,000 without breaking sweat. For someone whose equivalent throwaway figure is £10 million, spending £1,000 is like a normal guy spending a mere pound, or £10 for the £100k person, because £10 million is a thousand times £10,000.
Not all rich people are generous of course, but their spending shows the same pattern. There was a Piers Morgan programme where he put to Lord Sugar that he'd spent £30 million on a private plane just to avoid airport queues. Sugar thought about it and agreed.
Really? Are they single? More importantly, are they fussy?
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
At least when Boris was Foreign Secretary he had the decency to generally be too lazy to offer a quote. Lammy needs to step up his game or he'll never make PM.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Foreign Secretary seems like a shit job to be honest. The PM gets to go to the big ticket events and hobnob with the big figures, you are constrained by decades of foreign policy decisions in most cases, you don't get to do much that will be publicly popular, and verbal gaffes can cause real issues.
I'm not sure it should even really be regarded as Great Office of State thesedays. Health Secretary is a more important job, though not one you'd want for different reasons.
Is Tom doing the power stance? Tbh I've forgotten what the power stance was.
This Some management consultant made a killing embarrassing rich people selling that one. Like that person who gets paid thousands by rich white americans to tell them how racist they are.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
Basic rule of politics is surely that most of the time nothing much happens, even when it seems like it really should.
On Cleverly, this seems a strange statement - as I hear it - that an elderly couple in a 4 or 5 bedroom house are prevented from downsizing by the existence of Stamp Duty.
Yes, many of us have been making this exact same point for years.
Stamp Duty is a wretched tax on mobility.
If you are an elderly couple in a 5 bed house and you stay there until you pass on you don't pay a penny of stamp duty. If you downsize, you do.
Those arguing in favour of stamp duty make the fallacious argument that as there's large sums of money involved at the time of sales it is expedient to have a tax then, but the problem is it is a massive disincentive to mobility and discourages behaviour we should encourage.
Far better to abolish stamp duty and replace with an annual land value tax. A couple that downsizes should be decreasing their tax bill, not getting a hefty one they'd otherwise avoid.
They the Cleverly claim was that they had been stuck there for 35 years, which is bizarre.
(I pretty much agree with you on the abolition, but I'd do it as part of making Council Tax 0.5% of property value, which is different to your LVT but of the same ilk.)
It isn't bizarre. Many people stay in "the family home" for decades with no family living with them. Our tax system positively encourages them to stay there and not to move and will have done so for each of those 35 years.
So you don’t believe in the right to own property and do as you wish with it? Bit Communist.
No I do believe in the right to property ownership.
Quite the opposite, only taxing people when they buy or move is not letting them "do as they wish with it".
Taxes should be flat, low and consistent.
Those who buy this year should pay the same taxes as those who bought 50 years ago.
But what’s are you taking when you apply land value tax to people? You’re taxing quiet enjoyment, presumably for the common good.
Why would you apply land value tax to people? You would apply it to land and whoever owns the land pays the tax.
Whether you like it or not the country has running costs. Defence, law and order etc and whatever else Parliament has decreed.
The country only has a finite amount of land, if you own a portion of this countries land you should pay a portion of the running costs of the country.
That's not communism it's perfectly liberal.
You seem to think "quiet enjoyment" should for some reason be taxed less than other enjoyment. I would rather let people do as they please with what they own.
Land should be taxed the same whether the owner chooses to quietly enjoy it, or chooses to work it, or chooses to build on it, or chooses to sell it and the new owner takes responsibility for paying the costs.
Why are you opposed to letting people do as they will with what they own? The state should not get involved, it should take its cut of funding for the running costs of the country but let the owner do as he, she or they pleases to do with it.
For land with houses on I agree with you - as long as the LVT is replacing Council tax and is broadly neutral in its effects. But for land that is being worked for food, assuming you are going to have the same value per acre for all land, then suddenly pretty much every farm in the country becomes unviable. And what about stuff like the National Parks or National Trust land? I can definitely see the case for habitable land - and land with planning permission to prevent land banking by developers - but land that is being worked to provide is with our food or amenity land for our benefit - cannot be included as it would destroy much of the rural economy.
An LVT should be able to have local land values factored in, which would make rural costs cheaper than residential ones already.
If rural land is productively used it should be able to pay for some of the costs of running the country, but I agree with it being less.
The Treasury could exempt National Trust etc land as appropriate.
If we moved as I desire to a zonal system then you can include this tax within the zonal system by taxing residentially zoned land more - and I would allow anyone who owns rural land to change their own designation if they choose to develop it to residential (while letting other rural people keep theirs if they so desire) but if they change it then they would become liable for paying the taxes as a consequence of their choice.
I think this appears to be how so many people view tax - it is all well and good to levy taxes just so long as you tax something I do not have. In Bart's case he doesn't have land and is jealous of those that do. A large part of the farming community, even those with large landholdings, have marginal incomes. They work hard and spend their time productively. They can only hope that Rachel Thieves does not read Bart's ideas!
If agricultural land only produces a marginal income then its value is low, and any tax on that value is also low.
Farmers have nothing to fear from a land value tax.
We rent just over 3 acres of grassland for £3.6k/yr. It can only be used for grazing as per the nearby church covenant/negative obligation. Would that be taxed ? How would that be taxed ?
If you rent then you do not own the land so would not be liable for a penny of land value tax.
Your landlord might, although agricultural land could be exempt in some systems depending upon how you define it, and might want to attempt to pass on the cost but it would be a peppercorn amount given the value is so low.
You are talking bollocks if you think it won't be added to rent. While there are more tenants than places to rent there will be someone who will accept it to get a roof. All taxes on properties which are rented out will be passed down to tenants. I have lost count of my rent going up over the years because mortgage rates went up....I either had to grin and bear it or be homeless
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan unseals Special Counsel Jack Smith's redacted motion of evidence in the federal Jan. 6 case
Nerds will be fascinated by the details, but I cannot believe there's anyone in America who is 'on the fence' who will be moved by details not already known. Which is another reason unsealing is ok of course.
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan unseals Special Counsel Jack Smith's redacted motion of evidence in the federal Jan. 6 case
Any context to what those words mean?
This will put into the public sphere evidence of what Trump did and didn't do on January 6th 2020 in considerable detail. There will not be a trial in court before the election but there may well be a trial in the court of public opinion.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Apart from all the other obvious stuff, surely it would be northern Israel?
I am really struggling to work out which job his small smidgeon of skills might be relevant.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
The difference is that none of those examples came after a very public promise to be "different" to the previous lot. The reason Labour are tanking so hard is because they won solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt. If Labour had won on the basis of having better policies the majority might have been smaller but they wouldn't be suffering as much now.
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan unseals Special Counsel Jack Smith's redacted motion of evidence in the federal Jan. 6 case
Any context to what those words mean?
Because of the Supreme Court decision that Presidents are immune for any official acts (and I think presumed to be immune for a bunch of other stuff), the Special Counsel has filed a new (superceding) indictment in the DC election interference case (where Trump pressured officials etc), and in order to figure out whether the indictment must be dismissed or not (as Trump's team would like) the judge has to look over all the alleged actions forming part of it to determine which are official or not official etc. Which is why an unusually large filing was permitted at this stage of the process, which is unusual. And of course filings are typically public unless good reason otherwise, and the judge in this case has made clear political discomfort is not a reason in law to delay, in her view.
Trump's lawyers are spitting mad about it, as it will reveal details they don't want out there right now, but it's apparently a consequence of them winning so handily at the Supreme Court, requiring the judge to apply the standard they set out - they could have stated Trump was immune in this case, but instead they still left that question in the hands of the trial judge (where it will then be appealed upwards again, depending on her decision).
The US Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity should not prevent Donald Trump from standing trial for his “private crimes” in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to US prosecutors’ newly unsealed filing.
On Starmer’s repayment of more than £6000 of gifts, these are all gifts he and his wife Victoria received since the election. His argument - which eluded me when listening to him just now in Brussels, but I have subsequently twigged - is that the ethics of receiving gifts are different for a PM who wants to restore confidence in politics than for a leader of the opposition. So on this version only post 4 July gifts need to be repaid, excluding the tickets at his beloved Arsenal - because going to the Emirates is ingrained in his life and it’s not his fault that for safety reasons he can’t sit in his normal seats. I am told however he doesn’t believe his ministerial colleagues need to repay their post-election freebies, including the Taylor Swift tickets, because (implicitly) they are lesser mortals: he leads, they don’t have to follow
SKS is trying to dance on the head of a pin and it ain't going to work...
Reminds me of the time I argued me receiving tickets to Super League Grand Final tickets really wasn't a benefit because I hate rugby league.
That's actually a considerably more succinct and convincing argument than Sausages is trying to argue.
"Sausages" - you're on fire!
Starmer orders breakfast: "No sausages!"
Is that a westerner giving it the big "I am" in the middle east?
He was pretty big, and regarded as an Arab by many of the Arab tribes
We all remember the iconic scene. Emerging from the distance, piercing blue eyes, handsome as the sun ... and that was just the camel.
Minor links with history. I had a junior school teacher who'd known TE Lawrence.
Shit motorcyclist, though he got a permanent roadside shrine (it's just up the road from the Tank Museum), and a crusader type effigy in a Wareham church.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Foreign Secretary seems like a shit job to be honest. The PM gets to go to the big ticket events and hobnob with the big figures, you are constrained by decades of foreign policy decisions in most cases, you don't get to do much that will be publicly popular, and verbal gaffes can cause real issues.
I'm not sure it should even really be regarded as Great Office of State thesedays. Health Secretary is a more important job, though not one you'd want for different reasons.
Jeremy Hunt was good at it. He managed not to insult any major ally. It's hard to think of another Foreign Sec who accomplished this in recent times.
And The Telegraph definitely haven't published hundreds of articles about "possible" tax raids, that Labour have ruled out
Definitely not. It's thousands of articles. Or it seems like it sometimes on PB when excited people wave them in our faces like a Labrador licking your hand when it's been eating something dead in the woods.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
No, the difference is that this is relentless, and it started almost from the election, and it has no obvious end. Drip, drip, drip
Is Tom doing the power stance? Tbh I've forgotten what the power stance was.
More the out-of-power stance.
Back to Ed Miliband's energy policy again.
Ed Miliband's energy policy policy at the moment is to provide enormous tax relief (90%) for the exploration and development of new fields, incentivising companies to avoid the windfall tax by directing investment into fossil fuels.
That includes the 100 licences issued by Sunak last year (despite the misleading stuff you've read in (surprise) the Telegraph). That's means new drilling in the North Sea.
If Miliband was serious about binning oil and gas, he'd remove that enormous subsidy and revoke those 100 licences - but he's not. The North Sea is on the way out despite government policies, not because of them.
On Starmer’s repayment of more than £6000 of gifts, these are all gifts he and his wife Victoria received since the election. His argument - which eluded me when listening to him just now in Brussels, but I have subsequently twigged - is that the ethics of receiving gifts are different for a PM who wants to restore confidence in politics than for a leader of the opposition. So on this version only post 4 July gifts need to be repaid, excluding the tickets at his beloved Arsenal - because going to the Emirates is ingrained in his life and it’s not his fault that for safety reasons he can’t sit in his normal seats. I am told however he doesn’t believe his ministerial colleagues need to repay their post-election freebies, including the Taylor Swift tickets, because (implicitly) they are lesser mortals: he leads, they don’t have to follow
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan unseals Special Counsel Jack Smith's redacted motion of evidence in the federal Jan. 6 case
Any context to what those words mean?
We get to see exactly what Trump did, and didn't, do on that day
Ah. Well, that'll make all the difference.
It will win him no votes.
It has scope to lose him plenty. Especially with independents STILL inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. There's lots of material in there - Grand Jury interviews, for example - that are likely to be in direct opposition to what Trump has said.
There's a reason his lawyers tried every trick/appeal to prevent this.
It also feeds into the main story that came out the Veep debate - Vance's inability to say that Trump lost in 2020. The huge damage will be any extra details of Trump being told he had lost - or even, acknowledging that he had.
Starmer continues to refuse to discuss a youth mobility scheme . This is completely spineless . A two or three year scheme is not freedom of movement, why does he keep repeating this . Wtf is the problem with a scheme like this , the UK has them with some other countries .
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
The difference is that none of those examples came after a very public promise to be "different" to the previous lot. The reason Labour are tanking so hard is because they won solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt. If Labour had won on the basis of having better policies the majority might have been smaller but they wouldn't be suffering as much now.
Labour did not win “solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt”. Johnson was arguably ousted over corruption, but the reason Truss had to go and Sunak was voted out was much more about competence, and Labour won largely on not being incompetent.
Labour did not campaign against run-of-the-mill donations. They did campaign on the Frank Hester donations to the Tories: Hester gave much more than Alli, Hester was racist (unlike Alli), Hester profited from government contracts (unlike Alli).
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
Let's see how the polling looks in a few months before we decide who is getting "overexcited".
Sir "mile wide and an inch deep" won't survive a concerted push to get rid.
Will we actually have any VI polls in the next few months? The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
There is that. Everybody is needling Starmer and with some cause: his behaviour has not been good. But he does have an enormous majority and the field is his for the next five years. If TeamLabour hold their nerve (they won't, but for purposes of argument) he can do whatever he likes.
Even if Team Labour have an attack of the wobblies, the lack of a red equivalent of Graham Brady's enormous postbag makes it harder to dump a poor Labour leader. It's certainly possible that Labour make it too hard to get rid of a failing leader (look what happened with Jez), but equally the Conservatives make it much too easy, and one of the things we all have to get used to now is that politics is going to be slower and more boring than it has been since 2015 or so.
So what's the mechanism? The sort of parliamentary process that Boris ran away from? Hardly. Starmer has been politically dumb, but nobody has accused him of anything that's against the written rules. The sort of awfulness that means that half his government resigns? Not much sign of that, either. A realisation of the howling void in his soul? It's possible, but he's been a lawyer and a politician, so unlikely. A realisation that he will lose and someone else will win, like the Biden-Harris dynamic? Maybe, but not until 2028.
In the meantime, the noise remains what it always has been. The sort of displacement that teenagers do when they are caught with their hands somewhere they shouldn't be. "What are you doing telling me off, look at them, you're such a hypocrite..." Real as Starmer's faults are, tedious as his complaints were, his sins are as nothing compared with those of Big Dog.
A very close personal scandal could see him off
Starmer is a lying c*nt with no conscience, we know that now. And yes he's a lawyer, so he has pretty thick skin
But I suspect Starmer's Achilles heel is that family. If it looks like pain for them, he will go
For the purposes of clarity, I am not claiming there are any such scandals waiting to emerge, merely that is the kind of thing that could do it: topple Skyr Toolmakersson
Boris has extremely thick skin, but in the end his own MPs and ministers could no longer bear the drip-drip-drip, and he went, DESPITE winning and holding a large majority
Starmer is a career lawyer who reached the top, then a hobby politician who has reached the top in his second career. Starmer is in his 60s already and probably planned to step down during this or the next parliament in any case.
So it would not surprise me at all if Starmer goes in a couple of years, but weeks or months would leave me gobsmacked.
Personally I hope there are many more months of this abject humiliation - the country can (just about) stand it, and in the meantime, Starmer is poisoning the well of just about every craptacular social democratic idea and reinvigorating the right. Net Zero, the clamp down on free speech - he was in Europe today, he'll give the kiss of death to European reintegration too. Bless his (freebie) cotton socks.
You mention Net Zero. Some would say Ed Miliband is the only minister who has got anything done so far.
If you view making 100000+ people unemployed an achievement
Without over reacting, I would say that Ed Miliband is the single most dangerous man in Britain.
The donations story had died then Team Starmer reignite it this evening by repaying a small portion. Now we probably get a few days of every minister being asked will you make some repayments.
Middlesex’s future at Lord’s is in doubt with the club failing to secure a long-term extension of a tenancy agreement with the MCC that expires this year. After months of talks with the ground’s owners, Middlesex are close to agreeing a 12-month contract that will ensure most of their matches are played at the home of cricket next summer, but the club’s long-term future is uncertain.
Middlesex have been troubled by a number of governance and financial problems in recent years, with senior figures at the MCC believed to have expressed concerns about the way the county are run. There is also understood to be tension between some of the senior figures at the clubs.
This is it? The future of the conservative party. These four? Seriously?
Just astonishing.
Eh, they're mostly just typical politicians, bland or petty depending on the situation.
They need something fairly transformative, and that kind of ability is damn rare of course.
Plus they might just be stopgaps rather than the future. Expect a lot of 'who is the UK's Pierre Pollievre?' articles if the Canadian Tories win back power next year as currently expected.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
Let's see how the polling looks in a few months before we decide who is getting "overexcited".
Sir "mile wide and an inch deep" won't survive a concerted push to get rid.
Will we actually have any VI polls in the next few months? The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
3/ Special counsel Jack Smith’s office stressed the private and political nature of Donald Trump's actions around the 2020 election in his new court filing Wednesday.
"The executive branch," prosecutors wrote, "has no authority or function to choose the next president."
4/ That argument appeared designed for federal appeals courts, including the Supreme Court, that have placed a heavy emphasis in recent years on the historical understanding of the separation of powers.
In other words, Smith is arguing that Trump's effort to overturn the election was necessarily private because the Constitution gives a president no official authority for choosing his successor.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
No, the difference is that this is relentless, and it started almost from the election, and it has no obvious end. Drip, drip, drip
In that, it is nothing like Ecclestone
The thing is, there were other problems facing Blair in 1997/8, aside from the Ecclestone mess. They were more minor, but could have been troublesome.
But Blair had several advantages over Starmer: he was personally popular; he had won on a mandate of positivity; and he had a great team around him to spin the message.
Starmer has none of these, as many people pointed out before the election. He won because of the Conservative's woes, not because there was a great fervour for Labour's policies.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Foreign Secretary seems like a shit job to be honest. The PM gets to go to the big ticket events and hobnob with the big figures, you are constrained by decades of foreign policy decisions in most cases, you don't get to do much that will be publicly popular, and verbal gaffes can cause real issues.
I'm not sure it should even really be regarded as Great Office of State thesedays. Health Secretary is a more important job, though not one you'd want for different reasons.
Allow me to present an alternative. Everyone understands the above, so you can focus on one or two things you care about which the PM doesn’t, and do some good. You might even get to do that with Angelina Jolie like William Hague. The rest of the time you drink your way around the world, eating amazing food and seeing what money can’t buy, and have a ready made excuse to avoid the political nonsense at home.
This is it? The future of the conservative party. These four? Seriously?
Just astonishing.
The next Tory PM is not an MP yet. Blair was not an MP in 1979, nor Cameron in 1997, nor Starmer in 2010.
Thatcher got a far higher voteshare in 1979 than Starmer in 2024 though and Blair and Cameron's governments had far higher approval ratings in 1997 and 2010 than Starmer's does now.
Starmer's approval rating is closer to Wilson's or Heath's in the 1970s which saw two 1 term governments
The Labour peer at the centre of the donations row bailed out a baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Alli, a multimillionaire former banker and fashion entrepreneur, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin more than a decade ago to help her repay the expenses after the Lords authorities ordered her to refund the taxpayer.
Sir Keir Starmer would later announce that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran at the time, would not pursue fraud charges against her.
The Labour sleaze snake is now swallowing its own tail.
That's.... mind blowing
So the Generous Labour Lord, who underwrites the Labour PM's wife's designer panties, is also saving corrupt Labour MPs from the consequences of their own thievery
That "panties" ... oh dear.
You really are a certain type, aren’t you. I've met you so many times.
Heteresexual men with no doubts about that sexuality? Yes, you probably have. Not in the mirror, tho
"panties" ...
I once did a password crack run on our local users back in the early 2000s. Variations on the word 'panties' was the most common password.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
The difference is that none of those examples came after a very public promise to be "different" to the previous lot. The reason Labour are tanking so hard is because they won solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt. If Labour had won on the basis of having better policies the majority might have been smaller but they wouldn't be suffering as much now.
In Blair's case it very much did. One of New Labour's big pitches was to different after the Tory sleaze years. Cameron in his own way too promised to cleanup politics after the expenses scandal.
Lammy has called Southern Lebanon Southern Israel apparently. I don’t actually go with the popular theory that he's an idiot - but whatever else he is, a details man he ain't. His whole job is about making statements and representing the UK. I would suggest he should be offered another Cabinet job where different skills come in to play.
Foreign Secretary seems like a shit job to be honest. The PM gets to go to the big ticket events and hobnob with the big figures, you are constrained by decades of foreign policy decisions in most cases, you don't get to do much that will be publicly popular, and verbal gaffes can cause real issues.
I'm not sure it should even really be regarded as Great Office of State thesedays. Health Secretary is a more important job, though not one you'd want for different reasons.
Allow me to present an alternative. Everyone understands the above, so you can focus on one or two things you care about which the PM doesn’t, and do some good. You might even get to do that with Angelina Jolie like William Hague. The rest of the time you drink your way around the world, eating amazing food and seeing what money can’t buy, and have a ready made excuse to avoid the political nonsense at home.
And if the PM resigns, you’re in the running.
Might even be able to skip some controversial votes due to 'urgent' foreign business, or be aloof from factional fights so you can be the bland compromise option.
Middlesex’s future at Lord’s is in doubt with the club failing to secure a long-term extension of a tenancy agreement with the MCC that expires this year. After months of talks with the ground’s owners, Middlesex are close to agreeing a 12-month contract that will ensure most of their matches are played at the home of cricket next summer, but the club’s long-term future is uncertain.
Middlesex have been troubled by a number of governance and financial problems in recent years, with senior figures at the MCC believed to have expressed concerns about the way the county are run. There is also understood to be tension between some of the senior figures at the clubs.
So who plays at Lords if there's no county matches? Less than 10 days of internationals and similar number of potato starch based hit and giggles? Or do they want to takeover Middlesex?
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
Let's see how the polling looks in a few months before we decide who is getting "overexcited".
Sir "mile wide and an inch deep" won't survive a concerted push to get rid.
Will we actually have any VI polls in the next few months? The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
We have had some, though mostly by the minor players.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
The difference is that none of those examples came after a very public promise to be "different" to the previous lot. The reason Labour are tanking so hard is because they won solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt. If Labour had won on the basis of having better policies the majority might have been smaller but they wouldn't be suffering as much now.
Labour did not win “solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt”. Johnson was arguably ousted over corruption, but the reason Truss had to go and Sunak was voted out was much more about competence, and Labour won largely on not being incompetent.
Labour did not campaign against run-of-the-mill donations. They did campaign on the Frank Hester donations to the Tories: Hester gave much more than Alli, Hester was racist (unlike Alli), Hester profited from government contracts (unlike Alli).
The incorruptibility bit was, as lawyers say, an implied term in the contract voters had with Labour, especially those who lent their votes.
Anyway having a story running for weeks about venial bits of venality at the top of the Labour tree is itself incompetence, as is the disaster of how they managed the WFA thing, as is the failure to communicate a post election message, having made it clear that for Ming vase reasons there was no pre-election message except that we were centrist, honest, honourable and boringly competent.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
No, the difference is that this is relentless, and it started almost from the election, and it has no obvious end. Drip, drip, drip
In that, it is nothing like Ecclestone
The thing is, there were other problems facing Blair in 1997/8, aside from the Ecclestone mess. They were more minor, but could have been troublesome.
But Blair had several advantages over Starmer: he was personally popular; he had won on a mandate of positivity; and he had a great team around him to spin the message.
Starmer has none of these, as many people pointed out before the election. He won because of the Conservative's woes, not because there was a great fervour for Labour's policies.
IMV that spells big problems for him.
So, what’s your betting strategy? There are long odds on Starmer going in 2024/5 available. You could lay Labour majority or most seats at the next general: that’s a long way away, but you can trade on that bet to take profit.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
Stanley Baldwin waves from 1931.
National government!
The Tories themselves won 470 seats.
Ah, good times.
Had Theresa May not soiled the bed in 2017 the Tories were on course for roughly that (if not better.)
Cameron got only got 11,334,726 votes in 2015 to her 13,636,684 in 2017. You can't entirely blame her for the opposition not being split.
Indeed: her expectation (which would not have been an unreasonable one) would have been that with Corbyn being unelectable, that the Left would split as in 1983.
That was a terrible miscalculation, which made getting Brexit done significantly harder. (Come to mention it, having a leader of the Labour Party, who ironically was pro-Brexit, being unwilling to help get a Brexit vote through Parliament didn't help either.)
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
Let's see how the polling looks in a few months before we decide who is getting "overexcited".
Sir "mile wide and an inch deep" won't survive a concerted push to get rid.
Will we actually have any VI polls in the next few months? The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
No, the difference is that this is relentless, and it started almost from the election, and it has no obvious end. Drip, drip, drip
In that, it is nothing like Ecclestone
The thing is, there were other problems facing Blair in 1997/8, aside from the Ecclestone mess. They were more minor, but could have been troublesome.
But Blair had several advantages over Starmer: he was personally popular; he had won on a mandate of positivity; and he had a great team around him to spin the message.
Starmer has none of these, as many people pointed out before the election. He won because of the Conservative's woes, not because there was a great fervour for Labour's policies.
IMV that spells big problems for him.
So, what’s your betting strategy? There are long odds on Starmer going in 2024/5 available. You could lay Labour majority or most seats at the next general: that’s a long way away, but you can trade on that bet to take profit.
I don't bet (I know, I know...). The thing is, if he was facing a competent Tory party then he'd be in much deeper trouble. But he is not, at least yet - and perhaps not at all, if the new leader isn't very good. As long as the Conservatives remain in chaos, he can do okay.
The Labour peer at the centre of the donations row bailed out a baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Alli, a multimillionaire former banker and fashion entrepreneur, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin more than a decade ago to help her repay the expenses after the Lords authorities ordered her to refund the taxpayer.
Sir Keir Starmer would later announce that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran at the time, would not pursue fraud charges against her.
The Labour sleaze snake is now swallowing its own tail.
That's.... mind blowing
So the Generous Labour Lord, who underwrites the Labour PM's wife's designer panties, is also saving corrupt Labour MPs from the consequences of their own thievery
That "panties" ... oh dear.
You really are a certain type, aren’t you. I've met you so many times.
Heteresexual men with no doubts about that sexuality? Yes, you probably have. Not in the mirror, tho
"panties" ...
I once did a password crack run on our local users back in the early 2000s. Variations on the word 'panties' was the most common password.
I'm sure times have changed.
Pretty sure.
Almost sure.
...
Can't believe he just typed it out.
It’s also an egregious Americanism. Knickers is the British English. I’d have expected better from @Leon.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
No, the difference is that this is relentless, and it started almost from the election, and it has no obvious end. Drip, drip, drip
In that, it is nothing like Ecclestone
The thing is, there were other problems facing Blair in 1997/8, aside from the Ecclestone mess. They were more minor, but could have been troublesome.
But Blair had several advantages over Starmer: he was personally popular; he had won on a mandate of positivity; and he had a great team around him to spin the message.
Starmer has none of these, as many people pointed out before the election. He won because of the Conservative's woes, not because there was a great fervour for Labour's policies.
IMV that spells big problems for him.
At this stage, it's a two-part question.
a) are the problems ones that can (in theory) be fixed? Some of them, probably not. Starmer is what he is; not really an electoral politician who nonetheless ended up PM. That means he goes by what the written rules say, even when the unwritten rules of "what would my enemies do with this?" are more important. He's better at retail politics than he was, but still not great. The fiscal situation is not pretty and isn't going to get pretty, even if things go well. And plenty of people, to his left and his right, want him to fail. They want him to fail sooooooo much.
Others can be fixed. Once policy is happening, there will be something real to talk about. The Downing Street machine will presumably stop burping and farting as the guard changes. (I don't know how much of the trouble has been due to Simon Case, but having a Cabinet Secretary who really shoudn't be there on health grounds if nothing else can't help.) Who knows- maybe some of the stuff the government does will make some things better on the ground.
b) will they actually be fixed? That is the ten million vote question...
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
I don't regard slurping up over 100k of freebies from someone with an access agenda and also choosing not to prosecute an alleged fraudster because she was a Labour peer small beer.
There are two reasons it's small beer as scandals go - firstly it's a bad look scandal, he's not broken any rules. Unless more comes out there's therefore not a breaking point you can hang a resignation on. Sure it's hit Starmer's ratings but not moved the polls much - if you didn't like Labour before it's confirmed that view, if you're sympathetic to Labour it might make you think less of Starmer but it's not a deal breaker. Secondly none of the opposition parties have clean hands on donations and freebies, and in the Tories' case have far bigger problems if are seen as such.
It most certainly is NOT small beer. This was always what apologists for Johnson said, and that wasn't small beer either, it was blatant dishonesty combined with incompetence.
The difference between Starmer and The Clown is that many voters hoped Starmer was a boring straight man who was going to be honest and uncorruptible. He has proved he is nowhere close to that expectation.
And it took an endless string of scandals - and pretty robust proof he'd lied about several to finish Boris off.
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
The difference is that none of those examples came after a very public promise to be "different" to the previous lot. The reason Labour are tanking so hard is because they won solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt. If Labour had won on the basis of having better policies the majority might have been smaller but they wouldn't be suffering as much now.
Labour did not win “solely on the back of pledging to be not corrupt”. Johnson was arguably ousted over corruption, but the reason Truss had to go and Sunak was voted out was much more about competence, and Labour won largely on not being incompetent.
Labour did not campaign against run-of-the-mill donations. They did campaign on the Frank Hester donations to the Tories: Hester gave much more than Alli, Hester was racist (unlike Alli), Hester profited from government contracts (unlike Alli).
The incorruptibility bit was, as lawyers say, an implied term in the contract voters had with Labour, especially those who lent their votes.
Anyway having a story running for weeks about venial bits of venality at the top of the Labour tree is itself incompetence, as is the disaster of how they managed the WFA thing, as is the failure to communicate a post election message, having made it clear that for Ming vase reasons there was no pre-election message except that we were centrist, honest, honourable and boringly competent.
I’m not saying it’s been pretty for Labour, but the general election was not primarily about corruption, it was about kicking out the Tories for being incompetent.
Starmer continues to refuse to discuss a youth mobility scheme . This is completely spineless . A two or three year scheme is not freedom of movement, why does he keep repeating this . Wtf is the problem with a scheme like this , the UK has them with some other countries .
He'll sign it. But so long as the EU are asking for us to join in with migrant quotas and cave on fishing, the dance has to be danced. Once the more outlandish claims are removed, on both sides, things can get sensible.
Also PB Tories: Sir Keir should not have paid back the gifts.
Funny. Old. World.
He is hopeless and has just made it worse as the media are now asking why not the lot and Cabinet Ministers also had concert tickets and Starmer has seriously compromised them
You seem to console yourself with the PB Tories meme, but I doubt you can call Burley, Rigby, Peston and others as such
I expect many Labour voters are seriously disappointed in Starmer and one third regret their vote for him
Indeed Sunak's government is more popular than his
Funny. Old. World
In the face of such biting invective from Big G, the bloke on the internet, Sir Keir will simply have to console himself with a bigger majority than any ever achieved by Clem Attlee, Harold Wilson - or any Conservative in history.
A big majority did not save Johnson nor will it save Starmer
Johnson survived scandal after scandal until eventually his MPs had simply had enough. It seems vanishingly unlikely that'll happen to Starmer.
People are getting rather overexcited about fairly small beer.
Let's see how the polling looks in a few months before we decide who is getting "overexcited".
Sir "mile wide and an inch deep" won't survive a concerted push to get rid.
Will we actually have any VI polls in the next few months? The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
We'll have local by-elections.
They have already started looking horrible for Labour.
The Labour peer at the centre of the donations row bailed out a baroness after she was found to have wrongly claimed £125,000 in the parliamentary expenses scandal.
Lord Alli, a multimillionaire former banker and fashion entrepreneur, gave a £62,000 loan to Baroness Uddin more than a decade ago to help her repay the expenses after the Lords authorities ordered her to refund the taxpayer.
Sir Keir Starmer would later announce that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which he ran at the time, would not pursue fraud charges against her.
The Labour sleaze snake is now swallowing its own tail.
That's.... mind blowing
So the Generous Labour Lord, who underwrites the Labour PM's wife's designer panties, is also saving corrupt Labour MPs from the consequences of their own thievery
That "panties" ... oh dear.
You really are a certain type, aren’t you. I've met you so many times.
Heteresexual men with no doubts about that sexuality? Yes, you probably have. Not in the mirror, tho
"panties" ...
I once did a password crack run on our local users back in the early 2000s. Variations on the word 'panties' was the most common password.
I'm sure times have changed.
Pretty sure.
Almost sure.
...
Can't believe he just typed it out.
Am I missing something 1: is there something wrong with the word "panties"? Is it now considered archaic, childish or rude? Genuine question.
'The properties in Twechar, East Dunbartonshire, would cost £535,800 each to build and a senior figure in the authority said the outlay would be “ultimately repaid by tenants”.'
That number reminds me of some of the numbers from Los Angeles in recent years.
(Suggestion for anywhere there is a shortage of affordable housing: Set up an experiment in some convenient place, and buy a range of models from companies that manufacture homes. Rent them to tenants who are wiling to give feedback on convenience and quality for at least a year.
Repeat, until you have models that are known to be high in quality, and moderate in cost.)
Teachers stabbed by pupil thought they was going to die
What's the problem with this tweet? I don't see it.
"Teachers" and "they" are plural. "Was" is singular. If a teacher was using the pronoun "they", which I suppose is possible these days, it would be "teacher". Its illiterate. From the BBC. O tempora o mores.
Teachers stabbed by pupil thought they was going to die
What's the problem with this tweet? I don't see it.
"Teachers" and "they" are plural. "Was" is singular. If a teacher was using the pronoun "they", which I suppose is possible these days, it would be "teacher". Its illiterate. From the BBC. O tempora o mores.
Teachers stabbed by pupil thought they was going to die
What's the problem with this tweet? I don't see it.
Should be 'they were' not 'they was.'
Yes, it’s lousy grammar. Although (some) people in Wales (and Essex) do speak like that. Seems a bit of a trivial point to make though, given the horrific nature of the story.
Comments
Reeves still doing her outright best to trash the economy
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/02/nervous-shoppers-need-clarity-taxes-says-sainsburys-boss/
I'm sure times have changed.
Pretty sure.
Almost sure.
...
Would we notice?
If the same keeps happening to Starmer then yes, his MPs will get fed up and want to change leader. But that hasn't happened yet, and so at the moment this is merely damaging to his brand rather than one that could bring down a leader.
As it stands, Labour have been caught out because what was fairly standard practice in Westminster looks very bad from the outside when it's put up there in lights. That's damaging but hardly fatal. Especially when it's fairly easy to deflect by pointing out the other lot are at it just as badly, if not worse.
Recent political history is littered with scandals we breathlessly pored over at the time and thought were hugely consequential, only for them to fade into the background. Blair won two elections after the Ecclestone affair destroyed his "pretty straight kind of guy" pitch. Those of us who loathed Cameron thought he might be finished by his proximity to the main protagonists in the phonehacking scandal. Osborne had his palling around with Deripaska and so on.
This feels more like one of those to date, much as it excites those who viewed Labour and Starmer negatively to start with as it confirms their priors.
I'm not sure it should even really be regarded as Great Office of State thesedays. Health Secretary is a more important job, though not one you'd want for different reasons.
Some management consultant made a killing embarrassing rich people selling that one. Like that person who gets paid thousands by rich white americans to tell them how racist they are.
BREAKING: Judge Chutkan unseals Special Counsel Jack Smith's redacted motion of evidence in the federal Jan. 6 case
I am really struggling to work out which job his small smidgeon of skills might be relevant.
Trump's lawyers are spitting mad about it, as it will reveal details they don't want out there right now, but it's apparently a consequence of them winning so handily at the Supreme Court, requiring the judge to apply the standard they set out - they could have stated Trump was immune in this case, but instead they still left that question in the hands of the trial judge (where it will then be appealed upwards again, depending on her decision).
The US Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity should not prevent Donald Trump from standing trial for his “private crimes” in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to US prosecutors’ newly unsealed filing.
In that, it is nothing like Ecclestone
That includes the 100 licences issued by Sunak last year (despite the misleading stuff you've read in (surprise) the Telegraph). That's means new drilling in the North Sea.
If Miliband was serious about binning oil and gas, he'd remove that enormous subsidy and revoke those 100 licences - but he's not. The North Sea is on the way out despite government policies, not because of them.
(It's possible to work out more or less *when* they met, given the story and Lawrence's well-documented life...)
It has scope to lose him plenty. Especially with independents STILL inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. There's lots of material in there - Grand Jury interviews, for example - that are likely to be in direct opposition to what Trump has said.
There's a reason his lawyers tried every trick/appeal to prevent this.
It also feeds into the main story that came out the Veep debate - Vance's inability to say that Trump lost in 2020. The huge damage will be any extra details of Trump being told he had lost - or even, acknowledging that he had.
Labour did not campaign against run-of-the-mill donations. They did campaign on the Frank Hester donations to the Tories: Hester gave much more than Alli, Hester was racist (unlike Alli), Hester profited from government contracts (unlike Alli).
Just astonishing.
The polling companies seem "frit" at the moment.
One of these four is merely an interregnum
What an odd decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/oct/02/middlesexs-long-term-future-lords-doubt-failing-extend-tenancy-cricket
Middlesex’s future at Lord’s is in doubt with the club failing to secure a long-term extension of a tenancy agreement with the MCC that expires this year. After months of talks with the ground’s owners, Middlesex are close to agreeing a 12-month contract that will ensure most of their matches are played at the home of cricket next summer, but the club’s long-term future is uncertain.
Middlesex have been troubled by a number of governance and financial problems in recent years, with senior figures at the MCC believed to have expressed concerns about the way the county are run. There is also understood to be tension between some of the senior figures at the clubs.
They need something fairly transformative, and that kind of ability is damn rare of course.
Plus they might just be stopgaps rather than the future. Expect a lot of 'who is the UK's Pierre Pollievre?' articles if the Canadian Tories win back power next year as currently expected.
Blair was not an MP in 1979, nor Cameron in 1997, nor Starmer in 2010.
I'm starting to wonder if climate change has gained sentience. Chinese lab, anyone?
3/ Special counsel Jack Smith’s office stressed the private and political nature of Donald Trump's actions around the 2020 election in his new court filing Wednesday.
"The executive branch," prosecutors wrote, "has no authority or function to choose the next president."
4/ That argument appeared designed for federal appeals courts, including the Supreme Court, that have placed a heavy emphasis in recent years on the historical understanding of the separation of powers.
In other words, Smith is arguing that Trump's effort to overturn the election was necessarily private because the Constitution gives a president no official authority for choosing his successor.
https://x.com/jimsciutto/status/1841573825181581780
But Blair had several advantages over Starmer: he was personally popular; he had won on a mandate of positivity; and he had a great team around him to spin the message.
Starmer has none of these, as many people pointed out before the election. He won because of the Conservative's woes, not because there was a great fervour for Labour's policies.
IMV that spells big problems for him.
And if the PM resigns, you’re in the running.
Starmer's approval rating is closer to Wilson's or Heath's in the 1970s which saw two 1 term governments
It will axe the second child...
Or do they want to takeover Middlesex?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election
Anyway having a story running for weeks about venial bits of venality at the top of the Labour tree is itself incompetence, as is the disaster of how they managed the WFA thing, as is the failure to communicate a post election message, having made it clear that for Ming vase reasons there was no pre-election message except that we were centrist, honest, honourable and boringly competent.
That was a terrible miscalculation, which made getting Brexit done significantly harder. (Come to mention it, having a leader of the Labour Party, who ironically was pro-Brexit, being unwilling to help get a Brexit vote through Parliament didn't help either.)
Polling vs PB Tory anecdote.
How many times did Keir Starmer go to Taylor Swift concerts?
He seems to have had 4 tickets on 21 Jun (above), 2 on 15 Aug ("offered to and accepted by family members"), and 4 on 20 Aug
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1841577089364869143
But we need better than okay.
1) Would increase equivalised household income in multi-child households, so bring quite a lot of them out of poverty
2) I think richer households are more likely to have more than one child, so the rump child stock would generally be in richer households
3) Young, single parents haven't had time to have more than one kid (particularly teens), and tend to be very poor too.
a) are the problems ones that can (in theory) be fixed?
Some of them, probably not. Starmer is what he is; not really an electoral politician who nonetheless ended up PM. That means he goes by what the written rules say, even when the unwritten rules of "what would my enemies do with this?" are more important. He's better at retail politics than he was, but still not great. The fiscal situation is not pretty and isn't going to get pretty, even if things go well. And plenty of people, to his left and his right, want him to fail. They want him to fail sooooooo much.
Others can be fixed. Once policy is happening, there will be something real to talk about. The Downing Street machine will presumably stop burping and farting as the guard changes. (I don't know how much of the trouble has been due to Simon Case, but having a Cabinet Secretary who really shoudn't be there on health grounds if nothing else can't help.) Who knows- maybe some of the stuff the government does will make some things better on the ground.
b) will they actually be fixed?
That is the ten million vote question...
Betfair considers the following to be more like likely:
Cleverly 5.4
Rayner 6
Jenrick 6.2
Farage 7
Reeves 7.8
https://x.com/bbcnews/status/1841484989805756516
Teachers stabbed by pupil thought they was going to die
They have already started looking horrible for Labour.
That number reminds me of some of the numbers from Los Angeles in recent years.
For example: https://ktla.com/news/los-angeles-is-spending-up-to-837000-to-house-a-single-homeless-person/
(Suggestion for anywhere there is a shortage of affordable housing: Set up an experiment in some convenient place, and buy a range of models from companies that manufacture homes. Rent them to tenants who are wiling to give feedback on convenience and quality for at least a year.
Repeat, until you have models that are known to be high in quality, and moderate in cost.)
You mean they IS Welsh.