The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
It seems odd to dictate that only those 4 universities should be able to charge more. I would’ve thought that, as a Conservative, you would support a free market where every university can decide what to charge.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
I am also a Conservative NOT a free market Libertarian
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law Computer Science and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
No doubt for now my cause is lost, but the thought that there would subjects where people are encouraged to do them only if they want financial advantage indicates cultural and moral collapse. This triumph of extrinsic over intrinsic value removes a huge amount of what makes living worth the effort.
If anything that is exactly what we have now. Why study history, english, classics, theology or music or art when you can study economics, business or law or IT for the same fee and earn much higher earnings after
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
That’s basically my story. Gave up full time work very early, to do full time local politics, and when the electorate moved on, didn’t fancy returning to full time employment.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Yes but whether Musk's heart is in the same place as Trump or JD Vance is open to doubt. Maybe this is another calculation, as you suggest.
Mel Stride had the mother of all shit interviews on Camilla Tominey. He actually refused to call for Rachel Reeves' resignation and said 'It's a matter for the Prime Minister' like he was some sort of junior Government spokesperson. Tominey was gobsmacked. How can the Tories take a great opportunity like that and instead make the interview all about how shit they are?
It's also notable that since the Tories have no economic policies of their own, he was stuck telling Tominey how great Hunt's policies were not what the Tories would actually do. That isn't Stride's fault, it's Kemi's moronic 2 year no policy policy.
Sodding well improve you bunch of absolute muppets.
The basic problem the Tories have was shown by their ludicrous positioning on grooming gangs but equally goes for this. In that they want to make populist arguments as they find them attractive and are the shortest route to the sugar rush of bashing Labour. But are missing the fact that if you accept the logic of the populist right - that things are crap on any given issue because 'establishment' politicians are in a conspiracy against the public - then they are as implicated as anyone.
Yes, except that's a load of shite really isn't it?
The Tories call for a public enquiry into grooming looks like the sole popular intervention that Kemi has made so far (hence the fury of those on the left at her for making it), whereas this ludicrous equivocation of Stride getting his jowls in a wobble refusing to say that Reeves isn't up to the job is actually what you want him to do.
'The sugar rush of opposing Labour' is called being an opposition. If Tory supporters here had questioned why Labour was continually bashing the Government instead of attacking the Lib Dems, you'd have thought they were complete loons.
Their position is ludicrous because of who they are, and what it entails. Obviously we have to be careful around this, but there are, broadly speaking, two possible plausible and coherent arguments that can be made.
a) These are horrifying crimes that are an example of a wider state failure which far too slowyly, certain steps are being taken to address. We have had multiple local and wider inquiries already which have made their recommendations and these should be implemented. We have studied why these crimes happened, people have been jailed, and we should change laws so if anyone in a safeguarding role does the same again they end up in jail too. Whether we need another inquiry is something people can disagree upon in good faith but isn't a particularly urgent issue compared to implementing previous inquiries' recommendations. Not least because you may be waiting the best part of a decade before it concludes.
This is the government position and was the Tory one (though they didn't follow through by implementing the recommendations) until Elon Musk decided to tweet about it.
b) We need an inquiry because the state has conspired against the public, covering up these crimes, which previous inquiries are/were a part of. A new inquiry must go over this and specifically look into the role of race/religion played, solely, rather than as a subset of possible causes (what Jay's inquiry did).
This, roughly speaking, is the Reform/populist right one.
The problem the Tories and Badenoch have is that if they are making argument b) - which they now are - then they are as, if not more, implicated than Labour having been the government who coordinated the response to these crimes coming to light.
That's the point about the sugar rush of opposition for the sake of it. It feels good in the sort term in that it provides some easy bashing of the government, but can be terrible strategy if it makes you look silly in the end. This makes the Tories look silly as they can't explain what made them shift from argument a) to argument b) apart from opportunism. It is also woeful as if you buy argument b) then why on Earth would you back some of those responsible over an insurgent one which can claim relatively clean hands having not been in government locally or nationally?
It's the same on any issue where the Tories try and out-Reform, Reform because it's the shortest route to positive headlines in their friendly press. Labour's response is inevitable and easy "why are you opposing your own policies"?
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
History suggests that unseating prominent ministers is actually quite difficult. He’s a lot more prominent now, in cabinet, than he was in opposition. Voters like having a ‘big name’ MP. Yes, there was a spirited campaign against him by the pro-Palestinian independent in his seat, but what salience will that issue have come the next GE? Neither the Tories nor LibDems can now win his seat, so excepting another left field independent, he’s completely safe.
If Labour continue to be unpopular in the runup to the next GE is there not a chance of some lefty populist-y movement potentially taking off in some of these seats?
The Green Party, in places like Newham, for sure.
After all, most commentators and most bettors didn’t think the Greens would come through in seats like those they won in Suffolk and Herefordshire, yet they did.
But some random anti-Israel independent would be exceptionally lucky to win through against one of the (struggling) government’s relative high-performers, when we’d expect the Gaza issue to be less salient then than now.
It will be pro-Greenland independents next time around.
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
It feels like the March statement is now going to be incredibly important for Labour. If it does result in Reeves having to confirm that the fiscal headroom has gone and cuts will follow, it is going to cause a lot of fallout.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
The question is who ultimately benefits.
"being the bad guys" = doing the difficult shit of actually being in power.
Welcome to the reality of governing, Labour. If austerity is required, austerity it is.
Apparently your party will be fine according to @williamglenn .
As Labour collapse into obscurity the Conservatives will be playing second fiddle whilst Team Nigel/ Musk/Tommy/ Dom conduct the orchestra.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
No, fees should be based on the average graduate earnings premium they give primarily as those course with the highest earnings premium will have the highest demand and also be most affordable to pay back, with the remainder of fees being highest for courses which cost the most to run.
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
Obvious consequence there is that people who go to high-cost universities will be seriously discouraged from the sort of careers that have high social value but relatively low pay.
Forget trying to get good maths/physics grads to work in schools, or able lawyers doing anything other than the most commercial of work. Or anyone working for charities or the Church of England.
Is that really the sort of country you want to live in?
Why? As they will be paying lower fees to do maths and physics than they would if they did economics for instance, whereas now the fees are the same.
Fees in theology and humanities would also be drastically lower than fees in medicine or business or IT too. Law students who wanted to do legal aid work in criminal or family law could also be offered scholarships and bursaries while law students who wanted to commercial work or work for a City firm doing corporate law would pay full fees.
So yes it certainly would be a country I wanted to live in and would actually do the opposite of what you are suggesting once you take account of the higher fees for degrees with the highest earning premium.
If you don't get a high earning job, you won't pay all of the fees back anyway. So essentially there already is a sliding scale of fees, linked to earning potential of the degree.
Not really as 9% higher taxes for life is a higher burden than paying back all your fees then seeing your taxes drop by 9% per annum.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists, socialists, Remainers and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservatives, libertarians, Brexiteers or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
There is a large ex-council house estate near me. I've canvassed it over the years. It used to be Labour, then tactical Lib Dem. Now it is a hot bed of Reform.
I think Reform are as big a threat to Labour as they are to the Tories. And Starmer knows it.
The latest Find Out Now poll data tables show that Labour has lost 10% of its 35% GE share to Reform. That is 3.5% of the electorate. Conservatives have lost 17% of their 24% share. That is 4% of the electorate. These figures imply that Reform's increase in share is equally from Tory and Labour.
I think the two big voting blocks are going to be Reform and anti-Reform with lots of tactical voting, in the same way as it was Tory and anti-Tory at the last election.
Latest projection of EMA of polls, without tactical voting, is as follows:
Electoral Calculus though is now projecting a hung parliament based on poll averages. Even if Labour still have most seats and 310 MPs that would be the biggest decline in seats for a newly elected government at the next GE since Asquith's Liberal government lost 123 MPs at the January 1910 general election https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
But that’s because of how crazily successful they were last year, and by crazily successful, I mean, were rewarded by FPTP when voting was split many ways.
True but if Starmer's government hadn't been so crap they wouldn't have seen a 7% decline in their voteshare less than a year after their landslide general election win either.
Blair's government for example got a far higher voteshare in 1997 than Starmer did and about as many MPs but 6 months after the 1997 GE was polling even higher than it had got at that election
Maggie beat Callaghan by 7% in 1979 and found herself behind Labour straight away. Inheriting a complete mess from an exhausted Government doesn't make for instant popularity.
OTOH Starmer also suffers from being an uninspiring figure whose administration has already squandered a lot of political capital on measures that are simultaneously unpopular and ineffectual, largely thanks to the Treasury. The winter fuel payment decision was a particular own goal: if they were going to thump the wealthy grey vote then they really needed to do it in a way that would raise a lot of money, not with a measure that simultaneously looks heartless and will quite possibly transpire to have been revenue neutral.
You get the overall impression that Labour have some of the right ideas - and they're certainly less malignant than the Conservatives - but they're insufficiently competent and far too timid to effect the scale of change that's needed to refloat our rapidly sinking country. If Starmer survives the next election with a reduced majority, this will most likely be attributable to the manifest uselessness of the rump Tories, allied to Reform hitting its ceiling of support outside of areas that are both poor and white.
Reform is the disruptor. You need to build a credible scenario around Reform storming through and winning a lot of seats at the expense of Labour and Tories.
Labour's win was very thin and anti-Tory not pro-Labour. The Tories are lost in the wilderness.
Add in tactical voting (Pro and anti Reform) and it's really hard to predict.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists, socialists, Remainers and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservatives, libertarians, Brexiteers or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
It needs articulate, right of centre posters like your good self to join Bluesky and put forward your viewpoint.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
90% of those who went to Bluesky did so over politics, not because they wanted to see amusing posts of cats knitting on there
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Silicon Valley in the past say 80s and 90s was historically libertarian. It was socially liberal to the extent the dudes there liked free and easy sex but i dont think it was ever naturally woke.
Not sure what "naturally" woke means. Who fits that bill?
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
90% of those who went to Bluesky did so over politics, not because they wanted to see amusing posts of cats knitting on there
I am on it to read tech news and articles on case law, etc.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
Yeah you will coz you won’t have any jobs you thick twats and then you’ll all swing hard right. Belatedly
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law Computer Science and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
No doubt for now my cause is lost, but the thought that there would subjects where people are encouraged to do them only if they want financial advantage indicates cultural and moral collapse. This triumph of extrinsic over intrinsic value removes a huge amount of what makes living worth the effort.
If anything that is exactly what we have now. Why study history, english, classics, theology or music or art when you can study economics, business or law or IT for the same fee and earn much higher earnings after
Because not everyone is driven by money.
I have to say that I thanks my lucky stars that I studied Eng Lit and History at uni. Thank christ I didn't try to do economics or IT. Gaining that base - a working knowledge of the "canon" and a feel for what happened when - has given a lifetime's satisfaction. A great investment. And I still got a job.
Don't diss the arts. Many would argue they are the most important thing.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
90% of those who went to Bluesky did so over politics, not because they wanted to see amusing posts of cats knitting on there
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
Yeah you will coz you won’t have any jobs you thick twats and then you’ll all swing hard right. Belatedly
I'm interested that in the one I posted yesterday, Eleanor Frances flags up support from the Free Speech Union - which deserves a look.
Toby Young is exceptionally lampoonable, but has imo been a little over-satirised by some - eg the "Tobes Supports Eugenics" attack was heavily overdone.
I've remarked that haye positive achievements in some cases, though I am concerned with their potential political positioning - which could swing towards an American Right free speech fundmentalist, even Muskovite, perspective.
To get far they need to make themselves quite non-partisan - perhaps towards a right-leaning version of the left-leaning NCCL. IMO their biggest risks include getting Free Speech muddled up with partisan politics; that ultimately won't work in the UK as a principled stance, and currently they show some party-alignment, or rather anti-party-alignment.
But they are on the scene now, and are becoming significant as an organisation. They are a Company Limited by Guarantee, have 15 staff, an annual income of around £1-1.5 million, and claim 20k members paying at least £59 each per annum, and "supporters" making it up to 30k+ *. There's a risk that they could become respectable !
As a scale check, that makes them somewhat smaller than Humanists UK, who are about double on turnover, but have a commercial income from 10% levies on Humanist Weddings (last time I looked). HUK are very cagey about membership numbers, claiming 120k "members and supporters", but I think "supporters" means "people on our email list" (again, unless their practice has changed). In any case they work primarily though a network of influencers in politics. That 120k number is perhaps a "community" figure. Whenever I have seen their "are you a humanist" survey, pretty much every church minister I have ever known could qualify.
An interesting point for me re:FSU is their "partner" organisations listed on the front page. https://freespeechunion.org/
* Anglican Clergy Membership is discounted at £34.99, which for some reason I find a little amusing.
The reason she won is because she had two excellent lawyers experienced in this area of the law (Peter Daley and Akua Reindorf KC). A great pity the government's lawyers were not as good or, if they were, were ignored.
Or happy to support Austerity Reeves attack on the disabled as long as the Millionaire Donors are OK?
If only somebody on PB had warned us Austerity Reeves was a Red Tory!
I don't agree that Reeves is any sort of a Tory. But I do think that, if she decides the answer to her fiscal rules coming under pressure from higher borrowing costs is to implement more cuts, a lot of voters will look at Labour and ask whether very much has changed.
If the Labour Party stumbles its way through the rest of this Parliament simply managing decline and making empty promises of jam tomorrow then it will be in serious trouble. I think we've all had enough of jam tomorrow. Failure to deliver = lots of Reform MPs next time.
It feels like the March statement is now going to be incredibly important for Labour. If it does result in Reeves having to confirm that the fiscal headroom has gone and cuts will follow, it is going to cause a lot of fallout.
Labour don’t like being the bad guys. Labour MPs will be gutted to have to vote for deeper spending cuts.
The electorate will have another round of the “this isn’t what we voted for” anger.
The question is who ultimately benefits.
"being the bad guys" = doing the difficult shit of actually being in power.
Welcome to the reality of governing, Labour. If austerity is required, austerity it is.
Apparently your party will be fine according to @williamglenn .
As Labour collapse into obscurity the Conservatives will be playing second fiddle whilst Team Nigel/ Musk/Tommy/ Dom conduct the orchestra.
Much as I admire William's going out on a limb I think the only way such a scenario plays out is if the Tories basically became Cameroon again and merged with the LDs with Reform their main opponents and Labour split 2 ways between Corbynites and Starmerites
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
90% of those who went to Bluesky did so over politics, not because they wanted to see amusing posts of cats knitting on there
I am on it to read tech news and articles on case law, etc.
I went because X is a shit storm and it no longer performs the early breaking news reports X used to be brilliant at
Prime example was at the start of Covid when I was able to tell my parents that their cruise was being cut short 8 hours before the onboard announcement.
Which meant they were organized with hotels and flights before all hell broke out as everyone else panicked
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
Have you seen The Social Network? Zuckerberg's rating site for lady students hardly screams ‘woke’. What America has is a bunch of ultra-rich guys whose main interest seems to be their own bank balances.
Mainly a calculation, isn't it, the political positioning of these guys. Not sure about Elon Musk though. If this far right activist persona is an act it's a good one. His heart does seem to be in it.
Musk it's a combination of his priors, realising he no longer has to keep up an act, and radicalisation I think.
For a long time lots of Silicon Valley pretended to be more left-liberal than they really are because it was good PR. It got you fawning headlines and invited to the right parties. However, if you looked at, say, their attitude to union organising or regulation, i.e. something that might cost them money, it was always closer to the Republicans than Democrats.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
It was created easily, so I don't see why it wouldn't disappear as easily.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law Computer Science and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
No doubt for now my cause is lost, but the thought that there would subjects where people are encouraged to do them only if they want financial advantage indicates cultural and moral collapse. This triumph of extrinsic over intrinsic value removes a huge amount of what makes living worth the effort.
If anything that is exactly what we have now. Why study history, english, classics, theology or music or art when you can study economics, business or law or IT for the same fee and earn much higher earnings after
Because not everyone is driven by money.
Fine if daddy is a director of a bank or a KC and happy to fund Amelia studying History of Art or Theo studying Classics.
For the average student however most of them will look at the price of the degree course they are studying and compare it to the likely earnings they will get from it after graduation
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
Yeah you will coz you won’t have any jobs you thick twats and then you’ll all swing hard right. Belatedly
Mostly because the alternative would involve being dragged away to some correctional camp where the chances of emerging alive are significantly less than evens.
The more resolute and principled of us will be living in the woods waiting for the day when humanity overthrows its despots and returns to another period of sanity, until our grandchildren ignore what our children learned from our mistakes, and the whole cycle starts over again.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
Dream on!!
I've said it's a dream, but it's not a wholly implausible one given the polling momentum.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
Almost none of this is true, you just have to police your feed somewhat more, as Elon (PBUH) is allowing through more alternative right wing voices. Previously Mister Dorsey was like the Newent park-keeper who kept it all neat and tidy and centrist-daddy, a local park for local people, which is how you liked it
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
It seems odd to dictate that only those 4 universities should be able to charge more. I would’ve thought that, as a Conservative, you would support a free market where every university can decide what to charge.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
Shouldn't universities be able to charge whatever they can get away with? If students are prepared to pay £30k a year to do bowling green management at Del Monte, who are we to stop them?
No. As the market is then decided by universities not students or the value of the course.
Universities should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they are a top 5 ranked institution and departments should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they have a high graduate earning premium
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
That’s basically my story. Gave up full time work very early, to do full time local politics, and when the electorate moved on, didn’t fancy returning to full time employment.
I'd love to be able to afford to give up work, but I guess that applies to almost all of us. It's just a means to an end, isn't it?
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
It was created easily, so I don't see why it wouldn't disappear as easily.
I just don’t think this is a realistic prediction. My (I think our) generation is on the whole feminist, socially liberal, pro Europe, and economically left wing. That won’t just disappear just because you want it to.
It may change and get more anti immigration or even more extreme on the economic front in response to recession etc as Leon alludes but it wont be the Spitfire wankathon that is Reform or the Tories unless they change beyond all recognition
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
Almost none of this is true, you just have to police your feed somewhat more, as Elon (PBUH) is allowing through more alternative right wing voices. Previously Mister Dorsey was like the Newent park-keeper who kept it all neat and tidy and centrist-daddy, a local park for local people, which is how you liked it
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
Though apparently John Sopel has now left, having returned to Twitter following his flounce. So make of that what you will.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
You should be worrying about coming third (or worse), next time around. Sensible educated middle class folk won’t vote for you after the Brexit-Johnson-Truss fruitloop shitshow, and working class Brexit types would rather vote for the real thing.
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
Kemi has a clear market actually, middle class soft Leavers and rural voters. Problem is that only gets her to 20-25% and still well short of a majority without winning white working class hard Brexiteers now backing Reform that Boris won or middle class Remainers who voted for Cameron now voting for Starmer Labour and particularly the LDs
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
You should be worrying about coming third (or worse), next time around. Sensible educated middle class folk won’t vote for you after the Brexit-Johnson-Truss fruitloop shitshow, and working class Brexit types would rather vote for the real thing.
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
Kemi has a clear market actually, middle class soft Leavers and rural voters. Problem is that only gets her to 20-25% and still well short of a majority without winning white working class hard Brexiteers now backing Reform that Boris won or middle class Remainers who voted for Cameron now voting for Starmer Labour and particularly the LDs
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
Almost none of this is true, you just have to police your feed somewhat more, as Elon (PBUH) is allowing through more alternative right wing voices. Previously Mister Dorsey was like the Newent park-keeper who kept it all neat and tidy and centrist-daddy, a local park for local people, which is how you liked it
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
Though apparently John Sopel has now left, having returned to Twitter following his flounce. So make of that what you will.
I spent a week with Sopel and his dog, on the QM2. He’s a decent journalist, but an analytical thinker, he ain’t.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Most days, you’d be taking it alone, waiting for him to come round from his headache.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
That would require Reform to be their main opposition in the polls, at the moment it is still the Tories so Labour can lose middle class voters to them and the LDs and working class voters to Reform and hard leftists to the Greens and Corbynite Independents
You should be worrying about coming third (or worse), next time around. Sensible educated middle class folk won’t vote for you after the Brexit-Johnson-Truss fruitloop shitshow, and working class Brexit types would rather vote for the real thing.
Your party is starting to look like Woolworths, finding itself stuck without a market.
Kemi has a clear market actually, middle class soft Leavers and rural voters. Problem is that only gets her to 20-25% and still well short of a majority without winning white working class hard Brexiteers now backing Reform that Boris won or middle class Remainers who voted for Cameron now voting for Starmer Labour and particularly the LDs
Or you could have simply typed ‘yes’.
At the moment Labour, the Tories and Reform are all in the 20-30% range, we are heading for a hung parliament and probably some combination of Labour and LD government or Tory and Reform government being the main options for some time to come
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
It was created easily, so I don't see why it wouldn't disappear as easily.
I just don’t think this is a realistic prediction. My (I think our) generation is on the whole feminist, socially liberal, pro Europe, and economically left wing. That won’t just disappear just because you want it to.
It may change and get more anti immigration or even more extreme on the economic front in response to recession etc as Leon alludes but it wont be the Spitfire wankathon that is Reform or the Tories unless they change beyond all recognition
Well, Farage is already more popular with the TikTok generation than Starmer, so perhaps you're just getting a bit long in the tooth and out of touch.
You should also remember that the current generation are huge consumers of media, particularly US media, that is like a tepid bath full of floaty bits of woke consensus. It's a diet we are all fed on, and it informs the views of the more suggestible. If that all goes, whence go these views? Do you think these people are going to switch off their Netflix and Disney+ because they're not getting enough feminist and socially liberal content? Or will they just internalise and regurgitate whatever they're seeing - because you'd be made to bet against that.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
If we charged the full cost of a PPE degree at Oxford, what would be looking at? £3 billion per year per student?
That’s absurd
£30 billion a term is more like it.
Put in a wealth fund to cover the likely damage caused by these graduates?
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
It was created easily, so I don't see why it wouldn't disappear as easily.
I just don’t think this is a realistic prediction. My (I think our) generation is on the whole feminist, socially liberal, pro Europe, and economically left wing. That won’t just disappear just because you want it to.
It may change and get more anti immigration or even more extreme on the economic front in response to recession etc as Leon alludes but it wont be the Spitfire wankathon that is Reform or the Tories unless they change beyond all recognition
Well, Farage is already more popular with the TikTok generation than Starmer, so perhaps you're just getting a bit long in the tooth and out of touch.
You should also remember that the current generation are huge consumers of media, particularly US media, that is like a tepid bath full of floaty bits of woke consensus. It's a diet we are all fed on, and it informs the views of the more suggestible. If that all goes, whence go these views? Do you think these people are going to switch off their Netflix and Disney+ because they're not getting enough feminist and socially liberal content? Or will they just internalise and regurgitate whatever they're seeing - because you'd be made to bet against that.
Re. your first point, yes you may be right. But I am only making the point that there's 20-30% of the electorate that fits that viewpoint generally and that it wont just disappear. The "TikTok generation" doesn't change that.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
90% of those who went to Bluesky did so over politics, not because they wanted to see amusing posts of cats knitting on there
I am on it to read tech news and articles on case law, etc.
I went because X is a shit storm and it no longer performs the early breaking news reports X used to be brilliant at
Prime example was at the start of Covid when I was able to tell my parents that their cruise was being cut short 8 hours before the onboard announcement.
Which meant they were organized with hotels and flights before all hell broke out as everyone else panicked
Mike Pence’s office gave us 72 hours notice that the US border was closing. That was helpful in making sure everyone was in the right place.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
Tv series proposal taking shape.
Woke v Bloke An odd couple bicker their way round the globe, L making increasingly outrageous statements as each episode progresses, K tutting about the state of the world and L’s socks.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
Almost none of this is true, you just have to police your feed somewhat more, as Elon (PBUH) is allowing through more alternative right wing voices. Previously Mister Dorsey was like the Newent park-keeper who kept it all neat and tidy and centrist-daddy, a local park for local people, which is how you liked it
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
Though apparently John Sopel has now left, having returned to Twitter following his flounce. So make of that what you will.
I'm on Twitter and Bluesky but have uninstalled Threads. No point.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Most days, you’d be taking it alone, waiting for him to come round from his headache.
Yes, and we'd miss trains and flights. It would soon pall.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
What would really be a dream is the complete evaporation of the authoritarian, statist, UK-hating parties, and their replacement by a patriotic party of the towns and the working class - Reform, opposing a patriotic party of the shires and wealth creators - the Tories. That could happen. And broadly speaking that would lead to healthy growth, strong defence of the national interest, low cost energy, a little more spending when Reform were in, a little less when the Tories were in, and long term prosperity and growth.
I appreciate that this is your fantasy but there is a 20-30% that is millennial and woke and anti-Brexit and that won’t disappear easily and it certainly won’t start voting for the Tories
It was created easily, so I don't see why it wouldn't disappear as easily.
I just don’t think this is a realistic prediction. My (I think our) generation is on the whole feminist, socially liberal, pro Europe, and economically left wing. That won’t just disappear just because you want it to.
It may change and get more anti immigration or even more extreme on the economic front in response to recession etc as Leon alludes but it wont be the Spitfire wankathon that is Reform or the Tories unless they change beyond all recognition
Well, Farage is already more popular with the TikTok generation than Starmer, so perhaps you're just getting a bit long in the tooth and out of touch.
You should also remember that the current generation are huge consumers of media, particularly US media, that is like a tepid bath full of floaty bits of woke consensus. It's a diet we are all fed on, and it informs the views of the more suggestible. If that all goes, whence go these views? Do you think these people are going to switch off their Netflix and Disney+ because they're not getting enough feminist and socially liberal content? Or will they just internalise and regurgitate whatever they're seeing - because you'd be made to bet against that.
It's an interesting one as I tend to think you are formed by the big defining events that occurred when you came of age. Millennials and Gen Z tend to lean liberal left as were defined by the response to the financial crisis, subsequent stagnant pay, and Brexit being a mess. Today's pensioners lean Tory because their defining coming of age issue was the decline of the 1970s, which Labour tends to be blamed for.
There does appear to be something of a rebellion against that when it comes to Gen Alpha as a cohort who have been defined by what you might term the woke/anti-woke wars online.
The oddest thing one detects from the young is a very relaxed attitude to grifting. Are not at all concerned that someone is quite obviously taking the mick as that's how you get on, fake it until you make it and so on. We'd have thought rubbish like the Prime drink was unbearably naff for being such an obvious grift, but today's kids don't seem concerned at all.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
An opinion offered from deep personal experience, very clearly.
Oh dear! Still, these erstwhile woke billionaires rediscovering themselves as reactionaries does mean I can stop pretending to like them. It's clarifying.
What utter twaddle Zuckerberg talks.
Lol, "masculine energy" indeed. I'm picturing Meta workers bashing the keys, really giving their keyboards a good seeing-to.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
That is so obviously set up for the riposte "Unlike you, who have never started." that I am sooo tempted.
But no. Not my argument. @kinabalu can look after himself after all.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
It seems odd to dictate that only those 4 universities should be able to charge more. I would’ve thought that, as a Conservative, you would support a free market where every university can decide what to charge.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
Shouldn't universities be able to charge whatever they can get away with? If students are prepared to pay £30k a year to do bowling green management at Del Monte, who are we to stop them?
No. As the market is then decided by universities not students or the value of the course.
Universities should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they are a top 5 ranked institution and departments should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they have a high graduate earning premium
Maybe the state should ban every other market operating on that principle too? (Whose ranking, by the way? Obviously that will be a completely independent process that universities won't game at all. Certainly not).
There's a decent case on both social grounds and as national investment to cap fees for deomestic students, providing that the income lost by doing so is made up to keep the institutions viable and sustainable but beyond that the question of price should be one for the consumer and supplier, provided there is adequate information and choice.
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
Tv series proposal taking shape.
Woke v Bloke An odd couple bicker their way round the globe, L making increasingly outrageous statements as each episode progresses, K tutting about the state of the world and L’s socks.
It would work well and is a fairly established genre. There was a touch of that in Oz Clarke and James May’s wine trips, but not strictly woke v bloke. More poet v engineer.
Some sort of combination like Toby Young and Sue Perkins would work a treat.
ETA: my daughter’s currently at a birthday party of someone who’s mums a TV commissioner. Maybe I should pitch it.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
If a Conservative former MP, government minister, ex-whips, who had been posting porn for years, had been arrested on suspicion of engaging in sexual communication with a child, would the BBC have covered this front and central?
For some reason, they don't believe it is newsworthy enough on their front page of approx. 80 items. Nor is it in their political section.
His suspension from the Labour party in the summer was kept under wraps. Why? I can see news reports from June 24, are they connected?
I also see that someone who took a screenshot of one of his posts, to highlight what was happening, has been told that they could be charged under 2003 Communications Act, but not the former MP who sent it.
This guy has friends in government, very good close friends. He is followed on twitter by the entire Labour party, all the way up. He's even followed by the CPS.
The fall out from this could be huge. It's appears that this is not a sudden event.
Even in the darkness, I can find a joke..
Has anyone looked at who the CPS “follows”?
For some reason, I imagine the Piranha Brothers are on the list.
If it helps. The CPS only follow 1,656 people on twitter. Yet this man is one of them. Their timeline would have had a lot of his posts on it.
"Only"???
How much, in your eyes, is an average account?
There doesn't appear to be figures on an average 'following' on twitter, unlike average 'followers'.
But a quick look at some of those that the organisations that the CPS are following themselves:
Met police fed - 1642 Police fed - 925 NCA - 2395 College of policing - 3923 Moj - 1375 CBA - 4524 Dignity in dying - 8702 Law society - 888
I follow over a 1,000.
I'd say average. Someone manages this account.
The Head of Diversity and Inclusion at the CPS is friendly with Mr C****n. They've done a video together talking about how great it is to come out in the forces.
And your point is...?
It might explain why the CPS's social media account follows a former Defence Minister. That's all.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
Mmm, the "travel broadens the mind" chestnut. I'm not convinced. So many trips and each one delivers you back to base thinking and saying the same old things.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
My view is that it will still be an issue.
Yes, it’s a brave man or a fool - perhaps both - that predicts “Gaza will not be issue” in three or four years
The only way I can see it not being an issue is if Israel has completed Operation Drive Them Out and has made Gaza uninhabitable and seized the entire West Bank
And that in itself might be a bit of an issue…
Sure, even if there are no Gazans left alive in 2028/29 (which seems to be what Netanyahu's Cabinet wants), their massacre will still be an issue.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
It seems odd to dictate that only those 4 universities should be able to charge more. I would’ve thought that, as a Conservative, you would support a free market where every university can decide what to charge.
I note St Andrews is above Imperial in the Complete University Guide league table and second in the Guardian ranking. St Andrews is also second in the Times ranking, with Durham also above Imperial. In the THE world rankings, UCL, Edinburgh and King’s are all above LSE. Those three plus Manchester are above LSE in the QS world rankings.
There are other very oversubscribed courses, like psychology, computer science and dentistry. LSE is the most oversubscribed university, but Edinburgh is 2nd and UCL 3rd.
Electrical engineering, maths and physics have very high earning potential too.
There may be some scope for St Andrews, Durham, Edinburgh and Kings to also charge the maximum fees and LSE not to if not in the top 5 but I would only allow the top 5 UK universities listed in most university league tables to charge the maximum fee
Shouldn't universities be able to charge whatever they can get away with? If students are prepared to pay £30k a year to do bowling green management at Del Monte, who are we to stop them?
No. As the market is then decided by universities not students or the value of the course.
Universities should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they are a top 5 ranked institution and departments should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they have a high graduate earning premium
Maybe the state should ban every other market operating on that principle too? (Whose ranking, by the way? Obviously that will be a completely independent process that universities won't game at all. Certainly not).
There's a decent case on both social grounds and as national investment to cap fees for deomestic students, providing that the income lost by doing so is made up to keep the institutions viable and sustainable but beyond that the question of price should be one for the consumer and supplier, provided there is adequate information and choice.
There is an overwhelming reason why universities should not be free to set fees. The government is the body that funds the fees upfront. The student gains any benefit from the course (setting aside social goods). The paying back of the fees is completely unrelated to how much is owed but only related to earnings.
The whole system is madness of course, and should be rethunk from first principles.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
No, fees should be based on the average graduate earnings premium they give primarily as those course with the highest earnings premium will have the highest demand and also be most affordable to pay back, with the remainder of fees being highest for courses which cost the most to run.
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
Your upbringing boring? With a dad like yours? Really? Surprising.
Having a dad like mine was “the wrong kind of interesting”, if you see what I mean
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
Certainly worth a punt, I should think.
I seem to remember an obit (Guardian?) referencing a whiff of sulphur. Sounds promising.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
I think that the big advantage of Empire was power projection, around the globe.
It's probably cheaper - certainly these days - to buy natural resources off local elites, than to occupy a place, put in an army of occupation, and deal with insurgencies.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Note that, historically, revolutions of various kinds don’t come from the bottom.
The struggling portion of the middle, on the other hand…
Look at what people are spending money on.
Something the cliche about the "left behind" misses is that it's really the people in the middle who have been squeezed down by globalisation.
F*** yes! As one of the squeezed middle I can no longer afford a new BMW, so I'll have to make do with the one I have got for my daily journey to the soup kitchen.
I think you’ll find plenty of people who were sold the University Dream and now find themselves working for minimum wage plus a tiny bit. They have the fun of paying the rent from that.
Though I suppose you’ll tell us they could easily afford a BMW. If they cut back on the avocados from whole foods and the coffees from the hipster cafe on the corner.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
There's always the Bank of Mum and Dad or their inheritance. Just ask HY.
Why are you Tories so concerned with the debt of my children having gone to university? They should have gone down the coal mines like their Great Grandfathers before them, and known their place. A top university education should be for the elite of society and it should be free! Shouldn't it.
What about those who are earning pitiful zero hours wages and living in Rachmanesque accommodation? Do you not have a heart for them?
I’m not a Tory - haven’t voted for them in many a year.
I just listen to the complaints of those I speak to - simply turning jobs that used to be non-degree into degree jobs hasn’t made people richer. We need to try something different.
Which is why I advocate a complete merger of the university system with the apprentice/trade skills system. To start with, we get rid of the stupid prejudices between the two.
All courses become degree modules.
Next we encourage the kind of cross cultural mixing that produces new ideas - so the poetry student learns some welding. The bricklayer learns some Keats. The business grad learns about battery manufacture…
Welcome to the age of “1st from Cambridge in Tudor music and CNC operation”
Or just charge fees for degrees based on their actual graduate premium, so economics from Cambridge or law from Oxford or medicine from Imperial costs far more than studying humanities or creative arts from a lower ranked university
Tried and failed
No not tried and certainly not failed. Tuition fees are the same ie £9k whatever university you attend and whatever course you study which is ludicrous, no other OECD nation that has fees for degrees has such a ridiculous system. In the US Harvard and Yale and Stanford and MIT charge massively higher fees than lower ranked colleges to study there and law schools and medical schools and business schools also charge more
£9k is the maximum universities can charge, but it’s not what they have to charge. They can charge less.
Don’t Australia and Ireland also have the same charge irrespective of university? (Although Australia does vary that depending on the type of course.)
Yes and all of them will charge the maximum they can make. No university other than Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and LSE should be able to charge the maximum in my view and no course other than Medicine, Law and Economics which are massively oversubscribed and with high graduate earning premiums should be able to charge the maximum tuition fee either .
Would it not make more sense to reduce the cost of key courses and the best ranked courses so that they are more accessible to anyone regardless of their backgrounds and therefore make it more attractive for students to take those degrees and furnish the country with what it needs?
No, fees should be based on the average graduate earnings premium they give primarily as those course with the highest earnings premium will have the highest demand and also be most affordable to pay back, with the remainder of fees being highest for courses which cost the most to run.
Scholarships and bursaries can be used to reduce the cost of courses for those from low income backgrounds
Flat rate fees seem less intrusive.
Not when you consider the absurdly high fees arts and humanities graduates get lumbered with from lower ranked universities.
Those courses therefore lose students as a result too and should be much cheaper. While economics graduates from Cambridge going to work for Goldman Sachs after graduation and law graduates from Oxford going to work for Clifford Chance or a top commercial barristers chambers after graduating should pay higher fees than they do now
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
I think travelling with @Leon would be huge fun. For me anyway. Others might wonder why The Great Writer and Flint Knapper Extraordinaire is travelling with his sweary older sister, who flirts outrageously with all the staff and their extensive loud - and prolonged - arguments about every topic under the sun.
Very flattering but - in all honesty - I suspect I would be a pretty tough travel companion for most. If there is a dark menacing alleyway, I will generally go down it. If there is a notorious Mafia town 30km way, my reaction is Yay that’s a must see! Show me a country plunged into civil strife and I’ll show you a country with surprisingly cheap hotels, a glimpse of the true human condition, and a rich harvest of alarming anecdotes
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
How close are the rebels to the capital now?
I’ll use my daily image quote for this. A map of the Burmese civil war as it stands, roughly (btw most people say “Burma” and “Rangoon” AFAICS)
Utterly insane and Byzantine. And remember lots of these factions are fighting each other (eg Arrakan army fighting the Muslim Rohingya). Probably only that factionalism has preserved the junta?
But you can see why 1 travel is so hard and 2 the junta is in genuine trouble and 3 Rangoon is often without power
If the junta falls - as seems likely but not certain - or if some truce is agreed for a new settlement - god knows how they will sort it out
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
It follows that Labour can probably win in 2029 on an anti-Reform platform.
Especially under a Wes Streeting or similar.
Streeting wont win his own seat in 2029
Sorry but Gaza ain’t going to be an issue in 2028/9. Given the lack of support for Reform there Ilford North is going to return to a very safe Labour seat
My view is that it will still be an issue.
Yes, it’s a brave man or a fool - perhaps both - that predicts “Gaza will not be issue” in three or four years
The only way I can see it not being an issue is if Israel has completed Operation Drive Them Out and has made Gaza uninhabitable and seized the entire West Bank
And that in itself might be a bit of an issue…
Sure, even if there are no Gazans left alive in 2028/29 (which seems to be what Netanyahu's Cabinet wants), their massacre will still be an issue.
It can't be viewed in isolation though. If Labour's in what looks like a tight contest with two parties banging on about 'alien cultures' and deportations a big chunk of voters for whom it was a big issue in 2024 might suddenly discover they can live with Labour's M.O.R. position.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
I wish those on Bluesky well but as far as I can see it is a social media site for leftists and liberals to bring each other to 'progressive' climaxes without having to bother with any conservative, libertarian or nationalists polluting their feeds with contrary arguments.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Not everything is about politics you know
I'm not sure where we are on that. I have not seen any updated lists for a few weeks.
I think old age brings anesthesia - a dulling of the senses.
It's physical. Taste goes so there's a yearning for spicy food that you can actually taste.
And it's mental. So a delight in potential catastrophes. Invasion of extra terrestrials. Domination by AI. Calamitous global warming. WW3.
The alternative is dozing in the day room in Weston Super Mare.
I'm loving 2025 and all its promise. Is this selfish?
At least 2 of those might happen - if not in 2025 then really quite soon
As human beings we need to keep stimulation constant. Its why prosperity never lasts as we get bored. Its why empires fall. Its why retirement sucks for so many. We need challenhe and new experiences not retiring in an armchair at 60 for 20 years.
I retired at 49. Or "petered out" would be more accurate. I was like a stone skimming across the water, at first with zipping force, the skips long and fast, then gradually losing momentum, airtime shorter and shorter, until plop plop plop ... plop.
Thats good going. But thats a long time to be retired. Maybe you should travel the world or something maybe keep Leon company.
No, I wouldn't want to travel the world with Leon. There'd be an 'atmosphere' every day at breakfast.
Also, we’d only get as far as Antwerp and you’d want to turn back, in case we encountered even more foreigners and their funny ways
I'll have you know I've visited over 40 countries across 5 continents and lived/worked in several of those. But I don't *define* myself by travel like you do. I'm defined by other things. Thinking, mainly.
My guess is you stopped thinking about the same time you stopped travelling, or even long before
Mmm, the "travel broadens the mind" chestnut. I'm not convinced. So many trips and each one delivers you back to base thinking and saying the same old things.
I think I've added everyone who asked, but if I missed you PM me here or on Bluesky, and I'll update. I've left Alistair Meeks out, as he is not noticeably here.
I've also included several feeds around UK Politics and Parliament.
You get tabs for "who is here", "feeds", and "posts" (Which I think is for the accounts included).
For those not familiar, Bluesky pushes far less at you than Twitter, so both following and blocking tend to be more actively done. Starter Packs are to help find your way into clumps of the network than match your interests.
Bluesky is also crushingly dull. Which is a bit off-putting. No offence, but it is chock-full of people like, well, you
Going from Twitter to Bluesky is like going from a crowded, bustling pub where there's a fight in one corner but also a girl has got her tits out in the other, and there's a snug where you can buy heroin, and the landlord insists on playing vintage Led Zep and gangsta rap and projecting Leni Riefenstahl movies on the wall even as strange robots descend from the rafters and serve jellified tequila shots, to a library in a cathedral square where seven frriendly pensioners, all from Newent, discuss the history of Newent, and there's a genuinely interesting lecture, which you can actually hear, on fossil discoveries in Argentina
Escaping from the first to the second often feels like a relief. It IS a relief. But then after about half an hour you get a bit twitchy and think "fuck Newent" and you head back to the awful but brilliant pub
As you note though, the dullness is a feature rather than a bug.
Now, you may have an unusually high appetite for activity, excitement and stimulation - your life history, such as I know of it, would suggest so to me - but not everyone does want a pub like that. Me? I just want somewhere where I can get a decent drink, probably food, maybe some time at the pool table, and be able to listen to and converse with those I'm there with.
Bluesky: the Newent of the Mind
That’s how they should sell it, for the kind of people that enjoy an intellectual smalltown
Thing is, I find much more intellectual challenge, debate and activity on BlueSky than X. Noise isn't discussion or information, and it's much harder than it used to be to find the interesting stuff - and to avoid Elon pushing himself and his preferences. Plus, many of the interesting people I used to follow on Twitter are no longer active there, having either left entirely or gone inactive.
Almost none of this is true, you just have to police your feed somewhat more, as Elon (PBUH) is allowing through more alternative right wing voices. Previously Mister Dorsey was like the Newent park-keeper who kept it all neat and tidy and centrist-daddy, a local park for local people, which is how you liked it
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
Though apparently John Sopel has now left, having returned to Twitter following his flounce. So make of that what you will.
I spent a week with Sopel and his dog, on the QM2. He’s a decent journalist, but an analytical thinker, he ain’t.
Has he out-flounced Stephen Fry? He's the standard for Twitter flouncing.
The stark difference in the responses of Conservative and Reform voters in those polls tells you much about the difference in who supports each.
That’s why they embody the real political divide in British society. Labour will become an increasingly marginal relic of the 20th century.
Nonsense on stilts. The rich poor divide is only going to rise in salience as a political issue which means a party of the left will remain prominent. That doesn't have to be Labour but it's most likely to be. There's no socialist Farage on the horizon and when there is they are more likely to emerge from within Labour than from another party or a new party.
Labour can't represent the interests the working class because they reject the idea that they have any interests.
There's no lumpen "working class" but there is a crisis of inequality. Addressing this is the only way to reduce the number of people struggling in this relatively wealthy country of ours. Labour for all their flaws are the best bet on this. It's why I vote for them and why I'm a member.
This suggests that if there is a crisis, it's that the top 1% and 10% are doing better at the expense of the next 40%, but the bottom half have not seen any erosion in their share of income.
Income isn’t the relevant indicator, though. Wealth is. Since 2008 especially, asset price appreciation has been the issue.
The successive minimum wage increases have delivered a reasonable % increase in low earners’ income, but they’re still further and further away from home ownership, and being crippled by inflationary rent increases.
Low earners have rarely been able to afford home ownership.
Its housing affordability for the 25-75% band which is socioeconomically and politically vital.
And one of the under-commented features of the current labour market is that the inexorable generous increases in the minimum wage, coupled with pay restraint for many people in what Miliband called the ‘squeezed middle’, means that a surprisingly large number of previous well-above-minimum pay rates are now pegged to the minimum wage. A feature that remuneration professionals would describe as the erosion of differentials.
Cops rushed to Kamala Harris' evacuated Brentwood home on Saturday to reports of a potential burglary - as Los Angeles' lawlessness spiraled amid the city's worst fires in history.
Two people were ultimately arrested for breaching curfew after cops found no evidence they were outside the vice president's home to commit robbery.
However, the incident speaks to the fear that is gripping neighborhoods that have been ravaged by the monstrous fires. Looting is now running rampant as the flames continue to destroy homes across the City of Angels. At least 20 people have been arrested for looting in evacuation zones around the Los Angeles area.
A joint UK-Mauritius statement “could come tomorrow” according to a Bloomberg reporter.
Jesus they’ve gone and done it. The worst deal in British history, a fittingly bathetic end to the British Empire as I sit in colonial Rangoon. We’ve ended up giving away possessions and paying billions for the pleasure
Still well up on the overall Empire deal, though. Mega ££££ banked.
Despite being an article of faith with believers in reparations, that's not really true. Some investments in the Empire were profitable, but no more profitable than domestic ones at the time. There was no big 'appropriation' we can point to that enriched our country at the expense of the colonised. Colonies were actually very costly to administrate. Britain got rich by being the first industrial nation.
It doesn't mean other things haven't also made us wealthy or that reparations are due, but - c'mon - colonising a large chunk of the planet for so long was not financially advantageous to us? Of course it was. We didn't do it out of the goodness of our heart.
For security. Britain was a small trading maritime nation. We needed to keep that going to keep our country going. The direction of all foreign policy, including imperial policy, was to secure key trading routes, so we could import the raw materials we needed, and export finished industrial goods. It was only afterwards that there was this pomp and circumstance around the size of the empire.
Ok, have it your own way.
Always happy to learn more on the issue if you'd ever like to bring fresh info to the table.
No, I won't be doing that. I've said my piece. Empire = Exploitation. Exploitation = ££££ for the exploiter. That's the headline. Nothing to back it up except for loads of history books and podcasts, all by other people.
I think the mistake you are making was to assume it was exploitation by *Britain*
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements
Incidentally rcs our gracious host lives near Kamala Harris in Brentwood. Any news if he has had to evacuate.
A few weeks back, I related the story of my friend who had a surprise wedding. Incongruously - as he describes himself, self-deprecatingly, as a 'council estate thicko', he tells me he has a brother in law who lives next door to Kamala Harris. Maybe it's rcs100.
Comments
a) These are horrifying crimes that are an example of a wider state failure which far too slowyly, certain steps are being taken to address. We have had multiple local and wider inquiries already which have made their recommendations and these should be implemented. We have studied why these crimes happened, people have been jailed, and we should change laws so if anyone in a safeguarding role does the same again they end up in jail too. Whether we need another inquiry is something people can disagree upon in good faith but isn't a particularly urgent issue compared to implementing previous inquiries' recommendations. Not least because you may be waiting the best part of a decade before it concludes.
This is the government position and was the Tory one (though they didn't follow through by implementing the recommendations) until Elon Musk decided to tweet about it.
b) We need an inquiry because the state has conspired against the public, covering up these crimes, which previous inquiries are/were a part of. A new inquiry must go over this and specifically look into the role of race/religion played, solely, rather than as a subset of possible causes (what Jay's inquiry did).
This, roughly speaking, is the Reform/populist right one.
The problem the Tories and Badenoch have is that if they are making argument b) - which they now are - then they are as, if not more, implicated than Labour having been the government who coordinated the response to these crimes coming to light.
That's the point about the sugar rush of opposition for the sake of it. It feels good in the sort term in that it provides some easy bashing of the government, but can be terrible strategy if it makes you look silly in the end. This makes the Tories look silly as they can't explain what made them shift from argument a) to argument b) apart from opportunism. It is also woeful as if you buy argument b) then why on Earth would you back some of those responsible over an insurgent one which can claim relatively clean hands having not been in government locally or nationally?
It's the same on any issue where the Tories try and out-Reform, Reform because it's the shortest route to positive headlines in their friendly press. Labour's response is inevitable and easy "why are you opposing your own policies"?
As Labour collapse into obscurity the Conservatives will be playing second fiddle whilst Team Nigel/ Musk/Tommy/ Dom conduct the orchestra.
Especially since there's interest to pay too.
X for all its faults at least has both sides of the political argument on it now, until Bluesky stops being an echo chamber Musk has little to fear
Reform is the disruptor. You need to build a credible scenario around Reform storming through and winning a lot of seats at the expense of Labour and Tories.
Labour's win was very thin and anti-Tory not pro-Labour. The Tories are lost in the wilderness.
Add in tactical voting (Pro and anti Reform) and it's really hard to predict.
Come on in!
Don't diss the arts. Many would argue they are the most important thing.
Prime example was at the start of Covid when I was able to tell my parents that their cruise was being cut short 8 hours before the onboard announcement.
Which meant they were organized with hotels and flights before all hell broke out as everyone else panicked
For a long time lots of Silicon Valley pretended to be more left-liberal than they really are because it was good PR. It got you fawning headlines and invited to the right parties. However, if you looked at, say, their attitude to union organising or regulation, i.e. something that might cost them money, it was always closer to the Republicans than Democrats.
For the average student however most of them will look at the price of the degree course they are studying and compare it to the likely earnings they will get from it after graduation
The more resolute and principled of us will be living in the woods waiting for the day when humanity overthrows its despots and returns to another period of sanity, until our grandchildren ignore what our children learned from our mistakes, and the whole cycle starts over again.
I'll add him should he ask.
If I start adding people we find interesting, it will get mushy at the edges, and there is a limit of 150 members.
A second could be started, but since they are actually meant to be for a starter by that time it should not be necessary.
Those of us on the actual right had little choice but to sit in this park as it was the only one
Enjoy your Newent of the Mind, it does not surprise me that Bluesky’s weird twee, tidy, trainspottery ethos suits so many on here
Universities should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they are a top 5 ranked institution and departments should be banned from charging maximum fees unless they have a high graduate earning premium
It may change and get more anti immigration or even more extreme on the economic front in response to recession etc as Leon alludes but it wont be the Spitfire wankathon that is Reform or the Tories unless they change beyond all recognition
https://x.com/chrisgiles_/status/1878409367596290547?s=61
You should also remember that the current generation are huge consumers of media, particularly US media, that is like a tepid bath full of floaty bits of woke consensus. It's a diet we are all fed on, and it informs the views of the more suggestible. If that all goes, whence go these views? Do you think these people are going to switch off their Netflix and Disney+ because they're not getting enough feminist and socially liberal content? Or will they just internalise and regurgitate whatever they're seeing - because you'd be made to bet against that.
Woke v Bloke
An odd couple bicker their way round the globe, L making increasingly outrageous statements as each episode progresses, K tutting about the state of the world and L’s socks.
There does appear to be something of a rebellion against that when it comes to Gen Alpha as a cohort who have been defined by what you might term the woke/anti-woke wars online.
The oddest thing one detects from the young is a very relaxed attitude to grifting. Are not at all concerned that someone is quite obviously taking the mick as that's how you get on, fake it until you make it and so on. We'd have thought rubbish like the Prime drink was unbearably naff for being such an obvious grift, but today's kids don't seem concerned at all.
The men are behind the record time; one woman (Hannah Rickman) is a little ahead of the women's record.
https://live.opentracking.co.uk/spinerace25/
But no. Not my argument. @kinabalu can look after himself after all.
** quietly tiptoes away **
There's a decent case on both social grounds and as national investment to cap fees for deomestic students, providing that the income lost by doing so is made up to keep the institutions viable and sustainable but beyond that the question of price should be one for the consumer and supplier, provided there is adequate information and choice.
Some sort of combination like Toby Young and Sue Perkins would work a treat.
ETA: my daughter’s currently at a birthday party of someone who’s mums a TV commissioner. Maybe I should pitch it.
Fun for a bit but wearying after a while. I mean, even I get bored of my incessant appetite for this shit
I blame my upbringing. Hereford was SO boring it bred a pathological need for endless stimulation. Also, I can turn stories into money, an added incentive
The whole system is madness of course, and should be rethunk from first principles.
Bizarrely, for a womanizing bastard he was very timid when it came to other outre experiences. Not a great traveller, disliked danger and risk, never adventurous, never even learned to swim, was quite helpless in terms of self reliance (couldn’t cook, etc). He was a touch effete
Perhaps my lust for risk and danger is another form of Oedipal rebellion or filial rivalry? I dunno. I have actually examined this exact question in a book that, if I ever retire from flint knapping. I might punt out to publishers
I seem to remember an obit (Guardian?) referencing a whiff of sulphur. Sounds promising.
It's probably cheaper - certainly these days - to buy natural resources off local elites, than to occupy a place, put in an army of occupation, and deal with insurgencies.
Those courses therefore lose students as a result too and should be much cheaper. While economics graduates from Cambridge going to work for Goldman Sachs after graduation and law graduates from Oxford going to work for Clifford Chance or a top commercial barristers chambers after graduating should pay higher fees than they do now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_civil_war_(2021–present)
Utterly insane and Byzantine. And remember lots of these factions are fighting each other (eg Arrakan army fighting the Muslim Rohingya). Probably only that factionalism has preserved the junta?
But you can see why 1 travel is so hard and 2 the junta is in genuine trouble and 3 Rangoon is often without power
If the junta falls - as seems likely but not certain - or if some truce is agreed for a new settlement - god knows how they will sort it out
*thinks*
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Here's a starter pack of Lib Dem MPs, and a few other LD accounts. It's not all of them, but probably 2/3-3/4. This is maintained.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/markpackuk.bsky.social/3lauazjidtd27
Here's a Labour MP starter pack of about 110 MPs. Not sure if this is up to date.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/edenkaye.bsky.social/3lbb7zyqnqi26
Here's an MPs starter pack of 149 MPs from Politics Home. I don't think this is maintained.
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/politicshome.bsky.social/3laf36dk2nw25
I can't find anything for Conservatives, but recently Mark Wallace was trying to encourage them to engage.
Cops rushed to Kamala Harris' evacuated Brentwood home on Saturday to reports of a potential burglary - as Los Angeles' lawlessness spiraled amid the city's worst fires in history.
Two people were ultimately arrested for breaching curfew after cops found no evidence they were outside the vice president's home to commit robbery.
However, the incident speaks to the fear that is gripping neighborhoods that have been ravaged by the monstrous fires. Looting is now running rampant as the flames continue to destroy homes across the City of Angels. At least 20 people have been arrested for looting in evacuation zones around the Los Angeles area.
It was usually *British* chancers and promotors operating independently on the ground - basically a land based version of Raleigh or Drake - exploring the locals for all they were worth (literally)
“Empire” was a loose term employed to give a sense of order to a kaleidoscope of localised arrangements