After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
On the other hand, dumping a leader so soon will make them look like they aren't a serious party.
Which, like Jim Hacker said about a divided party, might be true - but they mustn't look it.
What strikes me about Trump and his clique is how self-defeating they are.
They talk about making America great, when all that they’re doing is retreating before people who hate America.
That’s where the comparison with Rome fails.
For all their faults, Roman leaders were not cowards. Trump and his clique are.
Russians hate America in the same way that the French hate America. They're not really implacable enemies.
If Trump succeeds, he will usher in a new era that will transform European politics as profoundly as 1989 did.
What, if we fake referendums in Talinn and Warsaw where 99.8% of the population want to join Russia?
No, I'm talking about Moscow becoming an ally of the West.
Ha, you mean Washington become one of Putin's puppet states.
A delusional view of the balance of power.
Putin gets everything he wants. What does the USA get? Destruction of alliances that have been decades in the making and the foundation of their economic power.
Sure the US has more power than Russia, but if it is used maniacally it does not maintain its value.
He wanted to conquer Ukraine and reestablish Russia as an equal of America and China. He’s failed and now needs to turn towards the West to avoid becoming a vassal state of China.
People like Putin don't believe in failure. He'll loo at ways he can still get to his aims. Therefore it isn't a peace.
And he didn't just want to conquer Ukraine; his geopolitical ambitions are much wider. And he still holds them.
So what if he still holds them? The French still dream of evicting America from Europe and uniting it under their geopolitical leadership, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be allies with them.
WTAF.
Do they not?
Okay. I'll spell it out so even you can understand - and hopefully your response will not be another stupid question.
Over the last two decades, Putin has physically invaded two countries and grabbed territory. All as part of his aims.
France has not, and shows no inclination to. Macron is not producing maps of Napoleon's empire to show what he wants. Putin is showing maps of the USSR.
Two countries? Three. Ukraine, Georgia and… Moldova! Arguably, Transnistria isn’t quite the same, but it has Russian “peacekeeping” troops defending a Russian-speaking population and there’s been talk of annexing it.
I’ve actually been within three feet of the Russian “peacekeeping force” in Transnistria. Probably the only PBer that can say that
It’s not that scary close up. But it does give me a reason to use my photo ration
They spent £30 million on a building...for a supercomputer that would have made the UK only the third country in the world with this capability...and the government cancelled it.
70-90% of universities will go bust in the next 5-15 years - or they will convert into something radically different
Or the government steps in. Remember university for little Johnny is seen as defacto right of passage now among parents. The Tories even suggesting cutting some courses was massively unpopular.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
On the other hand, dumping a leader so soon will make them look like they aren't a serious party.
Which was, of course, one consequence of ditching Truss, even though the sudden significant drop in support made them feel they had no choice.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
He held his seat in a very LDy sympathetic area. And he did cut NI significantly plus increase pensions relief.
No doubt in my mind he's a dry Tory. Trouble is, he has rat eyes and looks wet.
@kle4 I used to know Bob Blackman, very well, when I lived in Kenton.
He is remarkably good at appealing to Indian and Jewish voters, which is how he held a lot of Conservative council seats in Brent, from 1990-2010, and how he turned a seat like Harrow West (about 66% non-white), into a safe Conservatives seat.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
But you do have this unbeatable knack for getting it wrong.
What strikes me about Trump and his clique is how self-defeating they are.
They talk about making America great, when all that they’re doing is retreating before people who hate America.
That’s where the comparison with Rome fails.
For all their faults, Roman leaders were not cowards. Trump and his clique are.
Russians hate America in the same way that the French hate America. They're not really implacable enemies.
If Trump succeeds, he will usher in a new era that will transform European politics as profoundly as 1989 did.
What, if we fake referendums in Talinn and Warsaw where 99.8% of the population want to join Russia?
No, I'm talking about Moscow becoming an ally of the West.
Ha, you mean Washington become one of Putin's puppet states.
A delusional view of the balance of power.
Putin gets everything he wants. What does the USA get? Destruction of alliances that have been decades in the making and the foundation of their economic power.
Sure the US has more power than Russia, but if it is used maniacally it does not maintain its value.
He wanted to conquer Ukraine and reestablish Russia as an equal of America and China. He’s failed and now needs to turn towards the West to avoid becoming a vassal state of China.
People like Putin don't believe in failure. He'll loo at ways he can still get to his aims. Therefore it isn't a peace.
And he didn't just want to conquer Ukraine; his geopolitical ambitions are much wider. And he still holds them.
So what if he still holds them? The French still dream of evicting America from Europe and uniting it under their geopolitical leadership, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be allies with them.
WTAF.
Do they not?
Okay. I'll spell it out so even you can understand - and hopefully your response will not be another stupid question.
Over the last two decades, Putin has physically invaded two countries and grabbed territory. All as part of his aims.
France has not, and shows no inclination to. Macron is not producing maps of Napoleon's empire to show what he wants. Putin is showing maps of the USSR.
Two countries? Three. Ukraine, Georgia and… Moldova! Arguably, Transnistria isn’t quite the same, but it has Russian “peacekeeping” troops defending a Russian-speaking population and there’s been talk of annexing it.
Wasn't Moldova/Transnistria in 1992, before Putin?
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
Hunt could be a Clarke then, you're saying, because Clarke used to be a Hunt?
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
With a fair wind campaigning on such issues, Jendrick could go far. I wouldn't even put head of the local council as behind his reach.
He forgot to mention who cut, then capped, the funding from local government which would be used to clean streets, and who was Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government for 2 years during that period.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
From the comments: Context: these are actually west ham fans after losing to man city 6-0 at the Etihad during the 2013-14 EFL cup semifinal 1st leg
As that photo shows. It’s the main market in the main (only?) town in transnistria
I couldn’t work out why it was so good, not at first, but then I realised. It’s because they are so poor. Every single thing you eat is unprocessed. It comes from the ground. It’s either fresh that day or it’s pickled or salted. It’s European food (with Turkish/eastern elements) as it must have been 150 years ago
There is no msg no nothing. No junk. They can’t afford it
They spent £30 million on a building...for a supercomputer that would have made the UK only the third country in the world with this capability...and the government cancelled it.
70-90% of universities will go bust in the next 5-15 years - or they will convert into something radically different
Or the government steps in. Remember university for little Johnny is seen as defacto right of passage now among parents. The Tories even suggesting cutting some courses was massively unpopular.
We don’t have the money to save them all
Just the ones that PB parents have their sprogs at.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I do wonder if Kemi's PMQs windbaggery is actually a misguided Conservative tactic to get video for CCHQ's social media team to clip up. Each week she blunders several times into the same elephant trap, and I'm not sure if it is easier to believe Kemi really is that stupid or that a whole team of CCHQ Eton and PPE interns is.
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
Because she’s trying to be a lofty scold yet she’s actually a frightened loser. The combo is unfortunate and sounds like sad, peevish moaning
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
As far as I can see it is just Chump's useful idiots putting forward conspiracy theories or trying political attacks.
What has she been charged with by a jury of her peers?
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
On the other hand, dumping a leader so soon will make them look like they aren't a serious party.
Which, like Jim Hacker said about a divided party, might be true - but they mustn't look it.
Trouble is that the Conservatives have two options.
One of them is to dump Badenoch, the other is to keep her.
In slightly different ways, both options make them look like an unserious party.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I do wonder if Kemi's PMQs windbaggery is actually a misguided Conservative tactic to get video for CCHQ's social media team to clip up. Each week she blunders several times into the same elephant trap, and I'm not sure if it is easier to believe Kemi really is that stupid or that a whole team of CCHQ Eton and PPE interns is.
I support it from that perspective; Nigel talks over the head of his audiences for social too. But the actual questions being poor (as they were today) ruins it.
As many of you know, my politics tends towards the John Harris/Danny Dorling/Gary Stevenson axis, where poverty and quiet desperation exists. What I have noticed over the past few years is that they have either given up in fixing it or have realised that no solution is available due to the inability/learned helplessness of the state in taxing rich people.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
Because she’s trying to be a lofty scold yet she’s actually a frightened loser. The combo is unfortunate and sounds like sad, peevish moaning
Tastes will differ on that. But the reverse is that Vance and co frequently engage in perfomative whinging whether they win or lose, since they could just appeal like she says.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
For me the issue with Kemi's approach is she is trying to be calm and collected and talk about the details, but she's never going to beat a KC that way. She needs to go for more of a Boris-style bombastic approach with sarcasm and humour to get under Starmer's skin. Also throw a few curveballs.
I would have opened with the fact that Margaret Thatcher became Con leader 50 years ago this week, while national Lab have had 9 male leaders (if he says how regrettable, then you can suggest he resigns) Then pivot onto the Andrew Gwynne scandal and how it shows Lab to be sexist and how they hate the elderly.
I would say she needs to do the following: - Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy. - Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
I think the Tories need to make a meal culpa on migration. It's going to be the thorn in their side all parliament. From Reform obviously, but also from Labour as they succeed in reducing net migration very significantly from Tory highs.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
Agree.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
Their basic problem is that they want the rhetoric on a drastic cut to immigration (it will fall somewhat under Lab anyway) without the costs. Reform can promise the world safe in the knowledge that a) are the insurgents so can go a bit out there on stuff without so much scrutiny b) If they did get in it would be their main (only?) priority so would be willing to bear the costs of changing our economic and social model to do without migration.
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I do wonder if Kemi's PMQs windbaggery is actually a misguided Conservative tactic to get video for CCHQ's social media team to clip up. Each week she blunders several times into the same elephant trap, and I'm not sure if it is easier to believe Kemi really is that stupid or that a whole team of CCHQ Eton and PPE interns is.
I support it from that perspective; Nigel talks over the head of his audiences for social too. But the actual questions being poor (as they were today) ruins it.
It is the same every week. She crams two or more questions into one, so Starmer can pick which is easiest to answer. She makes speeches before pivoting to an often unrelated question. She gets involved in pointless arguments with Starmer. And this is even without blaming Starmer for the last Tory government.
Prime Minister – The right hon. Lady complains about scripted answers; her script does not allow her to listen to the answer. [Hon. Members: “More!”] She asked me if we are going to change the law and close the loophole in question one—I said yes. She asked me again in question two—and I said yes. She asked me again in question three—it is still yes. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-02-12/debates/F7E78EB7-2109-491A-B52D-6674CF970C8C/Engagements
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
Because she’s trying to be a lofty scold yet she’s actually a frightened loser. The combo is unfortunate and sounds like sad, peevish moaning
Tastes will differ on that. But the reverse is that Vance and co frequently engage in perfomative whinging whether they win or lose, since they could just appeal like she says.
Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 15m BREAKING: White House confirms it has lost at least 12 cases, at least temporarily, since becoming president. Acting illegally and losing cases is a hallmark of Trump.
He likes to find where the line is, and push it back where he can. He will win some, and reset expectations either way.
The attached video is quite funny. That is temporary injunctions, which means the Judge thought there was enough evidence that the case is likely to succeed.
There are several dozen others proceeding - at around 2.5 news ones per day.
'They present no evidence, and it is all a continued attack by Democratic activists on President Trump.'
Currently it seems to be 12-0. Notts Forest would be proud.
We lose every week We lose every week You're nothing special We lose every week https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUfLg2hBVRw (13-second video of football chant, not Arsenal btw!)
They’re Spurs fans ?
This is quite good, too:
Er, he’s Vice President and she is nowhere. Indeed lucky she’s not in jail
What does either of those things have to do with her actual words? You do appeal if you think the courts are wrong, and I'm sure the administration will. And even if she should be in jail for something that doesn't change the point either.
Because she’s trying to be a lofty scold yet she’s actually a frightened loser. The combo is unfortunate and sounds like sad, peevish moaning
Tastes will differ on that. But the reverse is that Vance and co frequently engage in perfomative whinging whether they win or lose, since they could just appeal like she says.
Trump should just slam them all in prison. After all, that’s what they tried to do to him
Mitch McConnell the sole GOP "No" on Tulsi Gabbard.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha.
Ha.
What would someone have to do to NOT get confirmed in that position then?
Also shows just how terrible scummy mcflorida face was as the initial AG pick.
A few people have commented on what Gabbard’s appointment means for 5-eyes and wider UK intelligence sharing with the US, but while I hope that sensible people in our defence community are doing the necessary I fear the sort of complacency born of decades of seeing the USA as an ally will mean nothing changes, at least to start with.
The US is at a crossroads and this may be temporary blip or a permanent shift, but the precautionary principle surely applies. We should be very careful about allowing sensitive information to get into the hands of people who are overtly sympathetic to our strategic foes.
Regarding the previous thread's header, the problem is that far too many people have not only not been getting richer, but have been getting poorer.
'Equality' or 'growth' is one thing its fine to quibble over when everyone is getting richer. A smaller slice of a bigger pie is an OK thing to have.
The problem is that not only some, but a great many people are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Which is frigging pointless/awful to have.
And that's not simply because 'the rich are getting richer' but because on average too often we're all getting poorer. We've been having many periods of "growth" which is "growth" in aggregate, but per capita a decline. If its a per capita decline, that's not growth in any meaningful sense.
I see the Danes are trying to buy California. Not a bad idea. Could combine with a swap for Greenland. Trump hates California.
I think there's a ballot initiative calling for independence under way in California.
That would condemn the rump 49 to decades of MAGA...
Once they have Canada they’ll be back to parity again.
More likely Oregon and Wahington would join and deprive the rump 47 of a contiguous Pacific coast and a warm water port. (Hawaii might join in too. Alaska less likely, but you can never be entirely sure of Alaskans.)
That would be so funny. Trump concentrating on the Pacific having lost his own Pacific!
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I also didn't expect much of Kemi - but she seemed like a blank canvas so I had no particular expectations.
But having watched/listened to her performances and interviews - there is a sense of arrogance. It reminds me of Masters students who have been told how amazing they are, without realising it was a leading question and not a statement of fact.
I've also still no idea if she's ventured much outside of the M25 noose. Been to Northern Ireland? Wales? The Western Isles? Northumbria? No idea.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
If the Tories want to form the next government, they will only do it with Hunt, or someone like Hunt, as leader.
Regarding the previous thread's header, the problem is that far too many people have not only not been getting richer, but have been getting poorer.
'Equality' or 'growth' is one thing its fine to quibble over when everyone is getting richer. A smaller slice of a bigger pie is an OK thing to have.
The problem is that not only some, but a great many people are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Which is frigging pointless/awful to have.
And that's not simply because 'the rich are getting richer' but because on average too often we're all getting poorer. We've been having many periods of "growth" which is "growth" in aggregate, but per capita a decline. If its a per capita decline, that's not growth in any meaningful sense.
Not so much a decline as flatlining (attached goes up to 2023. I think 2024 showed flat or a very slight uptick).
It shows how we were left reeling by the two shocks of the financial crisis in 2008 and Covid in 2020. But even after the financial crisis we returned to reasonable year on year growth after 2 years of shrinkage. Since Covid we’ve just stagnated.
The only other comparable period was 1973 to 1982, again triggered by two macro shocks but made worse by domestic factors.
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
I'm paying £50 a pop for my council to takeaway an old fridge freezer or mine on Friday.
It's no wonder some people can't be arsed. Or other less reputable traders offer to "get rid of it" for a tenner, and then dump it.
Won’t the local tatter take it for free ?
I leave metal products on the lawn and someone will take it FOC for recycling. Either they come round or you can call them.
Round here we call it freecycling.
Was there not a recent controversy here about a woman being fined for fly-tipping that might have been freecycling? Unfortunately Vanilla's search facility is worth than useless.
This thread is slightly hysterical. The USA remains part of NATO and article 5 still applies. Just not to Ukraine - but then it never did. What has been kiboshed is Ukraine's ambition to join NATO soonish, but that would itself have stymied the chance of negotiaions
Why do you think it follows that Five Eyes is in the freezer? In many domains I don't think that would even be possible.
It can't sensibly be anywhere else.
Trump himself is guilty of theft of Top Secret documents, casually displaying them to foreigners, and lying to, and actively deceiving, the FBI, to conceal them in his possession.
As far back as November Trump was simply refusing to have his people security checked.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
On the other hand, dumping a leader so soon will make them look like they aren't a serious party.
Which, like Jim Hacker said about a divided party, might be true - but they mustn't look it.
Trouble is that the Conservatives have two options.
One of them is to dump Badenoch, the other is to keep her.
In slightly different ways, both options make them look like an unserious party.
Pick your poison.
Or the other is just stick with her and hold the balance of power between Starmer and Farage in a hung parliament as a poll predicted today
Mitch McConnell the sole GOP "No" on Tulsi Gabbard.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha.
Ha.
What would someone have to do to NOT get confirmed in that position then?
Also shows just how terrible scummy mcflorida face was as the initial AG pick.
From senate majority leader to a complete irrelevance in his own party in just over a month. One of those "long time in politics" things.
McConnell is in his 80s and fell down the Senate steps last week. He is a frail party hack, but not aligned with MAGA. Ironically, it was he who saved Trump last time round.
They spent £30 million on a building...for a supercomputer that would have made the UK only the third country in the world with this capability...and the government cancelled it.
70-90% of universities will go bust in the next 5-15 years - or they will convert into something radically different
It is more of a fees issue, just charge higher fees for courses with the highest earnings premium and costs to run and freeze them or cut them for the rest
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
On the other hand, dumping a leader so soon will make them look like they aren't a serious party.
Which, like Jim Hacker said about a divided party, might be true - but they mustn't look it.
Trouble is that the Conservatives have two options.
One of them is to dump Badenoch, the other is to keep her.
In slightly different ways, both options make them look like an unserious party.
Pick your poison.
Or the other is just stick with her and hold the balance of power between Starmer and Farage in a hung parliament as a poll predicted today
In a three body scenario like that all three parties hold the "balance of power". It's a game of paper, scissors, rock
Regarding the previous thread's header, the problem is that far too many people have not only not been getting richer, but have been getting poorer.
'Equality' or 'growth' is one thing its fine to quibble over when everyone is getting richer. A smaller slice of a bigger pie is an OK thing to have.
The problem is that not only some, but a great many people are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Which is frigging pointless/awful to have.
And that's not simply because 'the rich are getting richer' but because on average too often we're all getting poorer. We've been having many periods of "growth" which is "growth" in aggregate, but per capita a decline. If its a per capita decline, that's not growth in any meaningful sense.
Agreed and part of this is media reporting.
GDP figures are already adjusted for inflation, which most people aren't aware of. So 1% growth often means the nominal GDP growth is 4%, but we have 3% inflation so we adjust for it. No one outside of central bank circles care about nominal GDP growth, or even know the term exists.
We should take this a step further and start reporting GDP growth per capita. So if we have 1% population increase, that 1% GDP growth above is reported as 0%.
I think that would correctly incentivise governments to focus on policies that improve the wellbeing of the average person, rather than just piling in more people to squeeze out a positive growth figure.
They spent £30 million on a building...for a supercomputer that would have made the UK only the third country in the world with this capability...and the government cancelled it.
70-90% of universities will go bust in the next 5-15 years - or they will convert into something radically different
It is more of a fees issue, just charge higher fees for courses with the highest earnings premium and costs to run and freeze them or cut them for the rest
Problem with that simple logic is there is a large disparity between some courses, how crucial they are to UK economy and resultant pay. Medicine being the obvious one. But things like Chemistry has been less offered because it is very expensive to run, so quite a few universities have just closed them. However, it is really important to many aspects of a knowledge based economy. If they really charged the cost of running Chemistry, would be really hard to get people to do it versus some other sciences.
I have said this for years, one of the biggest things they missed in 2010, was for certain crucial roles e.g. dentist, higher fees, but the government write off some of it every year you stay in the NHS.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I do wonder if Kemi's PMQs windbaggery is actually a misguided Conservative tactic to get video for CCHQ's social media team to clip up. Each week she blunders several times into the same elephant trap, and I'm not sure if it is easier to believe Kemi really is that stupid or that a whole team of CCHQ Eton and PPE interns is.
It's an example of how vacademically smart people can behave like idiots if they are building from misconceptions about the world. She's from a weird right-wing online millieu - like those interns - that thinks it has its finger on the pulse of Britain but doesn't.
That's not to say Britain is progressive or left-leaning, quite obviously it's not. But if you look at someone like Farage he knows his target voters inside out as he's spent decades cultivating them. He knows what makes them tick and how to raise issues that are salient with them and how they serve him and how to pick at a government's scab. Badenoch seems to think knowing whatever has got right-wing Twitter influencers hot under the collar this week is a substitute for that.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
They spent £30 million on a building...for a supercomputer that would have made the UK only the third country in the world with this capability...and the government cancelled it.
70-90% of universities will go bust in the next 5-15 years - or they will convert into something radically different
It is more of a fees issue, just charge higher fees for courses with the highest earnings premium and costs to run and freeze them or cut them for the rest
Problem with that simple logic is there is a large disparity between some courses, how crucial they are to UK economy and resultant pay. Medicine being the obvious one. But things like Chemistry has been less offered because it is very expensive to run, so quite a few universities have just closed them. However, it is really important to many aspects of a knowledge based economy.
I have said this for years, one of the biggest things they missed in 2010, was for certain crucial roles e.g. dentist, higher fees, but the government write off some of it every year you stay in the NHS.
But... you look up a report card, get a score, then close down the courses/department. That's how it works. That's why the VP's earn the £300k-400k a year.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
But you do have this unbeatable knack for getting it wrong.
This is coming from the man who's Liz Truss's die-hard sole defender, right?
"Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence"
Most people on PB will loathe this. But most people on PB are middlebrow 115 IQ centrist dads who like Radio 4 and think Rory Stewart is admirable and “clever”
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Farage needs to take care with these half sensible utterances that he doesn’t alienate his newly Trumpist Putinist membership. Some evidence of that in the comments already.
As we saw with Corbynites, purity spirals eat their children.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
Hunt is the best option.
He probably is, but he is tarnished with so long in government. He won't attract the Reform voter and probably not the Lib Dem switchers, also Labour can easily pin their "tough decisions" on some very dodgy decisions he made as chancellor.
You could perhaps compare him with Ken Clarke. In office, Clarke was hated by public sector unions and regarded as very abrasive, but he ended up being universally liked by centrists. Hunt could maybe pull off something similar with some careful image management.
"Centrists" - by which we mean established centre-left opinion - never like any Tory when they're in office.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
That really isn't true. I knew lots of traditional Labour and Liberal voters in 1970 who lent their votes to Ted. Harold was quite a divisive figure and the print media hated him (not least because he had won two elections) It might of course have been Ted's stance on joining the Common Market. For that alone I'd have voted for him if I'd had a vote aged eight. Wasn't so keen on his Education Secretary mind.
Yeah, that's nonsense though. At the time Ted Heath had a Selsdon Man manifesto, and was quite a bit firmer on immigration.
Centre-left voters like (some) Conservative leaders in hindsight, never when they're in office.
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I also didn't expect much of Kemi - but she seemed like a blank canvas so I had no particular expectations.
But having watched/listened to her performances and interviews - there is a sense of arrogance. It reminds me of Masters students who have been told how amazing they are, without realising it was a leading question and not a statement of fact.
I've also still no idea if she's ventured much outside of the M25 noose. Been to Northern Ireland? Wales? The Western Isles? Northumbria? No idea.
She's campaigning in areas with hardly any Tory seats .
Incidentally, I had not twigged that her majority is just 2600. What are the prospects of her losing her seat next time round, especially if Reform are around?
Party Candidate Votes % ±% Conservative Kemi Badenoch 19,360 35.6 −26.1 Labour Issy Waite 16,750 30.8 +17.0 Reform UK Grant StClair-Armstrong[a] 7,668 14.1 N/A Liberal Democrats Smita Rajesh 6,055 11.1 −8.6 Green Edward Gildea 2,846 5.2 +0.4
After praising Kemi last week, sadly Starmer (I know, Starmer!) made mincemeat of her this week. Or at least he was doing so three questions in when I had to stop watching.
Just horrible. Why on earth go on the ECHR? Ok if her stance was the Jenrickite scrapping of it, but that's not her stance. So she was trying to 'trap' Labour into saying that they 'might get a little bit cross with the ECHR', to which Starmer, who is currently trying to impersonate Farage, was only to happy to say "YES". It was an absolute bloodbath.
I hope she finished better than she started.
What I want to know is who's supporting her? Ok, the Machiavellian forces of Gove, Dougie Smith and Dom Cummings got her in, so how are they looking after their girl? She seems to be going into PMQs with zero coaching, there's not much happening on the media or social media fronts.
I'll admit this is what I would like to happen politically, but what she should do is say fuck it and go right. Let Jenrick and Sir John Hayes have their way with the PCP, and let David Campbell Bannerman have his way with CCHQ. Bugger the forces of darkness, they're sodding HOPELESS.
Kemi is a total dud, I think even worse than one would have imagined. Starmer is no Blair or Hague at PMQs and so many open goals, but she is like Harry Kane taking that penalty in the WC quarter-final.
The problem the Tories have is in the current parliament they don't have much talent at all, certainly not talent that is untarnished, willing to stand and experienced enough to know the dark arts of being an effective opposition / running a political party.
And yet Jenrick is good. He gets it. He uses social media very effectively. He’s a sharp and plausible speaker. He has the common touch (he’s not posh - arguably Kemi as an African haute bourgeois is posher than him)
He’s actually a bit of a star. And he’s smart
The trouble is he also comes across as an archetypal Tory shit and Alan bstard. Indeed he probably is all that
But do the Tories have much choice? If they go for a pathetic wet centrist like Hunt, Stride or Cleverly they are finished and will turn into the Lib Dems
Jenrick is the one guy who might simultaneously worry Reform AND Starmer
The west is swinging hard right. This is not the time for Tories to tack to the centre, FFS
I don't really get why the Reform curious/leaning like Jenrick more, he is a changling and personally I think he is a bit slimy in his manner.
But whoever is leader big risks probably need to be taken, and with Reform riding high playing it safe might look too passive.
There's a real mixture in remaining Tory ranks though - I've met some who despise Reform, whilst others want to be Reform.
Is it not that, slimy toad that he is, he understands the basics of politics in a way Badenoch simply does not? He'd have a ceiling but would also have an obvious strategy would stick to. He might end up being the new Michael Howard in terms of being unlikeable to most but rescuing the Tories from disaster but maybe not quite having the juice to get over the line and become PM.
I think my view was that Kemi was a bigger risk but also potentially bigger reward, but that's an outsider's view obviously. From my perspective she's struggled to get attention, she might as well be a LD with the media attention she gets.
Not a fan of hers but did not think she'd be quite this bad and could see how if played her cards well could be a reall challenge for Labour a seeming something new and fresh.
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
I also didn't expect much of Kemi - but she seemed like a blank canvas so I had no particular expectations.
But having watched/listened to her performances and interviews - there is a sense of arrogance. It reminds me of Masters students who have been told how amazing they are, without realising it was a leading question and not a statement of fact.
I've also still no idea if she's ventured much outside of the M25 noose. Been to Northern Ireland? Wales? The Western Isles? Northumbria? No idea.
She's campaigning in areas with hardly any Tory seats .
Incidentally, I had not twigged that her majority is just 3000. What are the prospects of here losing her seat next time round?
Party Candidate Votes % ±% Conservative Kemi Badenoch 19,360 35.6 −26.1 Labour Issy Waite 16,750 30.8 +17.0 Reform UK Grant StClair-Armstrong[a] 7,668 14.1 N/A Liberal Democrats Smita Rajesh 6,055 11.1 −8.6 Green Edward Gildea 2,846 5.2 +0.4
Next to none, on current polls she would increase her majority over Labour with Reform still well behind
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Abolishing the triple lock would save nothing in the immediate term. Tax relief on pension contributions is estimated at between £20 and £40 billion a year. Abolishing higher rate relief would save money immediately and would only impact the higher paid like newspaper columnists and MPs who drone on about the triple lock as a diversionary tactic.
To save serious money on pensions, tax relief is the place to look, not the triple lock.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Privatise the motorways. Truss’s favourite IEA say it would raise 150bn overnight.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
The triple lock should have gone immediately. Pick one measure as comparator and go with it.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
Hang on, wasn't Farage telling us just last year that the West goaded Russia into war by not ruling out Ukraine NATO membership?
Don't worry! The media will forensically take him to bits over this policy inconsistency. They 100% won't just breathlessly report it as being brilliant and outflanking every other politician through the ages. Then report on how the media is reporting on it. Then..... Over to our Senior Politics Editor to report on what Nigel has said about what Nigel has said. Senior sources have told me....
The language is somewhat less diplomatic but the message is the same as it has been since Obama. The US is much more interested in the Pacific than they are in Europe. China, their only real rival, is in the Pacific as are most of the world's most dynamic economies. That is where history is happening.
Europe is a (fairly wealthy) backwater. The main strategic threat is Russia which has been destroyed as a conventional threat thanks to the blithering incompetence of Putin. I really wouldn't fancy Russia's chances against Poland in a conventional war at this point, let alone western Europe. Within 10 years it won't even be close.
The great game has moved on. To be honest, that is not necessarily a bad thing for a continent that has seen far more than its fair share of wars.
Correct David, we should tell Trump and the USA to F**k right off , chuck them out of NATO and build a proper NATO ready to give Putin the doing he deserves. Get rid of the surrender monkeys. PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
So it looks like Trump's promise of peace in Gaza and Ukraine lasted less than a month. Hamas already now refusing to release more hostages and Netanyahu threatening more Israeli bombing and special forces raids.
Now the US Defence Secretary giving Zelensky terms he clearly can't and won't accept so that conflict continues too. European defence spending still needed to be increased regardless anyway given the US is more focused on containing China and its own borders militarily than protecting NATO Europe
Trump is giving Netanyahu the All Clear to finish Gaza off for good. I suspect that will now happen. Israel will return to the fray - either next weekend or next year - and entirely level Gaza so that not even an ascetic hamster could reoccupy it
All the facts are a-changing. Pity the Gazans
Which will just create even more Hamas terrorists whether they stay in Gaza or are forced out to Jordan or Egypt
Israel won’t care. Better the Jew-haters are in Jordan or Egypt - beyond the world’s biggest walls - than “inside” Israel
Provided they can secure their borders to then keep Hamas out
Israel has excellent security. Have you ever flown El Al?
However even the best security cannot defend against an angry and open prison occupying a large chunk of the nation in the southwest corner
So, logically, it will be ended
I am not cheerleading this. I say again if I was a young Palestinian lad I would be CONSUMED with hatred for everything Israeli and Jewish, and for very very good reasons. But that just makes Israel’s logic more inexorable
There was a brief chance of peace under Clinton. It has gone forever
I am appalled at what's likely to happen but...
That seems to be a lot of people's line on imminent genocide.
Collective punishment is not justified.
But if it happens it has been wrought by Hamas, Fatah and the PLO and their actions over decades.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
If we accept America is Rome moving from Republic to Empire than Greenland and Canada etc make total sense
if the USA can somehow seize Greenland and persuade Canada into the fold then it has a totally impregnable position, it is North America, and ownership of the mineral wealth of Canada and Greenland means it cannot be menaced by China in any form
We should probably join. It is time for an Anglosphere. The Five Eyes as a nation would boss the world, which would be fun, especially after I’ve done 39 minutes on the elliptical
Utter bollox, there speaks a quisling shit scared cowardly arse.
Same people calling Starmer a traitor in respect to Chagos are more than happy to crawl up Donald's arse when he sells out Ukraine and NATO.
He's simply codifying what previous US policy already was. Obama didn't support Ukraine in 2014, Biden pulled back from NATO and prioritised APAC. It was up to us in Europe to be ready to pay for our own defence, we've had 10 years since Ukraine was first invaded and relied on an increasingly detached US administration Dem or GOP. It was a mistake and continues to be a mistake. People like you who blame America for not protecting our border are the problem. Maybe we should cut benefits by £20bn per year and pay for the defence of our own border properly and not, as first world countries rely on others to do it for us.
The UK defence budget as a percentage of GDP could be brought up to parity with that of the United States with an immediate increase of about £30bn. This is about 10% of the estimated total social security spend for this financial year, so on the face of it that sounds doable.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
Cancel the PIP, reign in "disability" benefit for minor mental health issues like anxiety and non-clinical depression, cut the triple lock, and taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers at a rate of 20% starting at £50k, so £1 of state pension withdrawal for every £5 in income over £50k. I think that will raise £30bn and more.
"Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence"
I was asking 'o3-mini' tonight to find an optimal plan for my annual leave. Gave it lots of details, public holidays, the likely maximum time I could take in one break, that I liked to have a few breaks through the year, the current date. etc.
After three minutes of 'reasoning' it told me to take all my holidays in one block from mid-November until Christmas.
"Plus subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at a higher level of intelligence, and Pro subscribers will be able to run GPT-5 at an even higher level of intelligence"
I was asking 'o3-mini' tonight to find an optimal plan for my annual leave. Gave it lots of details, public holidays, the likely maximum time I could take in one break, that I liked to have a few breaks through the year, the current date. etc.
After three minutes of 'reasoning' it told me to take all my holidays in one block from mid-November until Christmas.
What strikes me about Trump and his clique is how self-defeating they are.
They talk about making America great, when all that they’re doing is retreating before people who hate America.
That’s where the comparison with Rome fails.
For all their faults, Roman leaders were not cowards. Trump and his clique are.
Are they? Or are they just renouncing the global policeman role to concentrate on realpolitik that benefits the average American - and we don’t like it?
It is, at least, arguable
The US has benefitted enormously from being world policeman since 1949. The way the world works serves their economic and power-political interests.
Here’s what Hesgeth actually said (Telegraph)
“The firebrand US secretary of defence said the Continent would have to step up to support Ukraine and confront the threat of Russia as his country shifts its focus to tackling China and securing its domestic borders.
He also ruled out sending US troops to help keep the peace in Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
“I’m …. here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States from being the primary guarantor of security in Europe,” he told a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at Nato headquarters.
“The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland.
“We must – and we are – focusing on securing our own borders. We also face a peer competitor in China with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific”
If I was an American taxpayer I’d find that completely reasonable. America is threatened by China as it never was by the USSR. China is America’s equal (see: DeepSeek)
Europe must shift for itself
OK, well the point is simple then as to why that's a bad idea for the US. If we as Europeans now regard America as an unreliable ally that is no longer is any meaningful way a defender of post-war western democratic norms. Then there's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be looking to get into bed with China as an unideal but more dependable and practical partner with more to offer us, that deals can be cut with.
Except that’s total fucking nonsense and you know it. You sound like a petulant Frenchman. Get a grip
Why is it nonsense? You are proposing realpolitik and making the decisions that look best for ourselves with no American underpinnings of our security - so why wouldn't we be better off, longer term, in increasing ties to China and letting transatlantic ones expire?
With those assumptions about American trustworthiness and help to protect and co-operate with Europe gone. You have two superpowers as potential primary security and trade partners and have to choose as they are at odds. Both of which are really not ideal and easy bedfellows.
Do you go with the one that's erratic, threatening to invade your territory, imposes tariffs on a whim, looks increasingly out of control and corrupt, and which is quite open in regarding bullying as its primary approach to foreign policy. Or do you go with the one that is still a nasty corrupt dictatorship but is more predictable, less noisy and is the up-and-comer.
Not saying we have a flounce and sign up to doing Beijing's bidding - quite obviously we are quite tied to the US for now. But where's the incentive to not say, increase trade cooperation with China or go with Chinese tech when it's more efficient or advanced?
Previously America could make the demands of a helpful friend to side with it. But if that's gone and it's everyone for themselves as you say, why shouldn't we want cheaper Chinese goods or infrastructure over an overpriced American version? Moreover, if they want some military or tech kit we have that we can sell them, why should we not take their money and create or protect jobs? Previously the answer was due to our strategic ties to the US, but if they're not worth a damn, as you say, then well.
We should chuck the f**kers out of chagos base and rent it to China
Comments
With a fair wind campaigning on such issues, Jendrick could go far. I wouldn't even put head of the local council as behind his reach.
Which, like Jim Hacker said about a divided party, might be true - but they mustn't look it.
It’s not that scary close up. But it does give me a reason to use my photo ration
- Always attack from a position of Tory strength. Economy, growth and taxation are OK subjects. Foreign policy and defending the UK is OK. Immigration a lot less so, partly because she hasn't firmly separated herself from the Government she was part of, or developed much of her own policy.
- Have a devastating and personal attack - a hand-grenade effectively lined up for when she needs it.
No doubt in my mind he's a dry Tory. Trouble is, he has rat eyes and looks wet.
But, I don't think he is.
He is remarkably good at appealing to Indian and Jewish voters, which is how he held a lot of Conservative council seats in Brent, from 1990-2010, and how he turned a seat like Harrow West (about 66% non-white), into a safe Conservatives seat.
He started off TRG, but is now pretty right wing.
Then didn't even like Ted Heath.
I leave metal products on the lawn and someone will take it FOC for recycling. Either they come round or you can call them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/11/zelenskyy-europe-cannot-guarantee-ukraines-security-without-america
I think it's down to a combination of lack of experience, laziness, arrogance, plus being very online and mistaking being up with what people are talking about on TwiX for the mood of the country or good strategy. She doesn't seem like someone who could take criticism well and learn from it.
But that's Bobby J for you.
Even as a Lib Dem I think migration was at a unsustainably high level.
Every time they bring it up the finger will be pointed at them. Best to say sorry and promise they've changed than they to pretend it never happened.
As that photo shows. It’s the main market in the main (only?) town in transnistria
I couldn’t work out why it was so good, not at first, but then I realised. It’s because they are so poor. Every single thing you eat is unprocessed. It comes from the ground. It’s either fresh that day or it’s pickled or salted. It’s European food (with Turkish/eastern elements) as it must have been 150 years ago
There is no msg no nothing. No junk. They can’t afford it
It is absolutely fucking delicious
And I eat what I want 🕺
I'll let you decide in which direction, mind.
Kemi has said she's taking ownership and drawn a line without taking ownership or drawing a line. Just flipping say sorry and admit you were wrong.
What has she been charged with by a jury of her peers?
We have Trump's attitude to JD Vance:
"Do you view JD Vance as your successor?"
"NO".
https://youtu.be/7tmPMVh1vIM?t=19
One of them is to dump Badenoch, the other is to keep her.
In slightly different ways, both options make them look like an unserious party.
Pick your poison.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha.
Ha.
To encapsulate this depressing outlook, here is a lecture by Gary Stevenson (53 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jwCLwi_N70
The Tories? They want to have their cake and eat it, as ever.
Also shows just how terrible scummy mcflorida face was as the initial AG pick.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tulsi-gabbard-russian-connection-dni-trump-syria-b2692244.html
Prime Minister – The right hon. Lady complains about scripted answers; her script does not allow her to listen to the answer. [Hon. Members: “More!”] She asked me if we are going to change the law and close the loophole in question one—I said yes. She asked me again in question two—and I said yes. She asked me again in question three—it is still yes.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2025-02-12/debates/F7E78EB7-2109-491A-B52D-6674CF970C8C/Engagements
The US is at a crossroads and this may be temporary blip or a permanent shift, but the precautionary principle surely applies. We should be very careful about allowing sensitive information to get into the hands of people who are overtly sympathetic to our strategic foes.
'Equality' or 'growth' is one thing its fine to quibble over when everyone is getting richer. A smaller slice of a bigger pie is an OK thing to have.
The problem is that not only some, but a great many people are getting a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Which is frigging pointless/awful to have.
And that's not simply because 'the rich are getting richer' but because on average too often we're all getting poorer. We've been having many periods of "growth" which is "growth" in aggregate, but per capita a decline. If its a per capita decline, that's not growth in any meaningful sense.
But having watched/listened to her performances and interviews - there is a sense of arrogance. It reminds me of Masters students who have been told how amazing they are, without realising it was a leading question and not a statement of fact.
I've also still no idea if she's ventured much outside of the M25 noose. Been to Northern Ireland? Wales? The Western Isles? Northumbria? No idea.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/970672/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk/
It shows how we were left reeling by the two shocks of the financial crisis in 2008 and Covid in 2020. But even after the financial crisis we returned to reasonable year on year growth after 2 years of shrinkage. Since Covid we’ve just stagnated.
The only other comparable period was 1973 to 1982, again triggered by two macro shocks but made worse by domestic factors.
Trump himself is guilty of theft of Top Secret documents, casually displaying them to foreigners, and lying to, and actively deceiving, the FBI, to conceal them in his possession.
As far back as November Trump was simply refusing to have his people security checked.
New: Nigel Farage has broken from Donald Trump on Ukraine
“I think Ukraine now joining NATO is almost an essential part of this peace deal,” Farage tells GB News tonight
GDP figures are already adjusted for inflation, which most people aren't aware of. So 1% growth often means the nominal GDP growth is 4%, but we have 3% inflation so we adjust for it. No one outside of central bank circles care about nominal GDP growth, or even know the term exists.
We should take this a step further and start reporting GDP growth per capita. So if we have 1% population increase, that 1% GDP growth above is reported as 0%.
I think that would correctly incentivise governments to focus on policies that improve the wellbeing of the average person, rather than just piling in more people to squeeze out a positive growth figure.
https://x.com/sama/status/1889755723078443244
OPENAI ROADMAP UPDATE FOR GPT-4.5 and GPT-5:
I have said this for years, one of the biggest things they missed in 2010, was for certain crucial roles e.g. dentist, higher fees, but the government write off some of it every year you stay in the NHS.
That's not to say Britain is progressive or left-leaning, quite obviously it's not. But if you look at someone like Farage he knows his target voters inside out as he's spent decades cultivating them. He knows what makes them tick and how to raise issues that are salient with them and how they serve him and how to pick at a government's scab. Badenoch seems to think knowing whatever has got right-wing Twitter influencers hot under the collar this week is a substitute for that.
Collective punishment is not justified.
Now, you, as a hypothetical new Work and Pensions Secretary, have got to decide who to impoverish. You can't get out of this by making the usual claims about clamping down on fraud, because Government has always been pitiful at dealing with the problem and in any case total losses to benefit fraud are estimated at about £7.5bn. So most of it is going to have to be swiped off genuine claimants, and it's not going to take long before you have to make some very nasty decisions. You could raise the whole sum by abolishing housing benefit, but then everyone who relies on it to afford their exorbitant rents ends up out on the streets (except for families with children, who all end up being housed by councils which promptly become insolvent.)
Abolishing child benefit would raise about £13bn, but the nation's parents will despise you and the poorer ones will also be turning off the central heating or feeding the kids cheap bread and jam for dinner. You could decide that Universal Credit claimants are all just scroungers really and scrap that, which would earn you over £50bn but cut so many people off at the knees, working poor as well as unemployed, that you'd probably trigger civil unrest. Most of the rest of the benefits bill goes on pensioners and the disabled.
On top of that, if you're going to preserve your headroom for future increases in defence spending to at least keep pace with inflation, then you're presumably going to want to prevent runaway increases in future social security from swallowing up your revenues. In that instance, the big ticket item is elderly benefits, which already account for 55% of all social security expenditure, primarily on our old friend the triple locked state pension. If you're serious about this then the triple lock is going to have to go, and go immediately. Can you imagine the screaming?
Restoring the increasingly dire public finances through the convenient medium of slashing benefits is an old favourite of political rhetoric, but once you spend five minutes thinking about the options you quickly realise why it is that politicians struggle to do it. Any serious effort would produce millions of victims, risk causing significant social problems, and probably get the administration responsible the order of the boot at the next election.
As we saw with Corbynites, purity spirals eat their children.
Centre-left voters like (some) Conservative leaders in hindsight, never when they're in office.
Incidentally, I had not twigged that her majority is just 2600. What are the prospects of her losing her seat next time round, especially if Reform are around?
Party Candidate Votes % ±%
Conservative Kemi Badenoch 19,360 35.6 −26.1
Labour Issy Waite 16,750 30.8 +17.0
Reform UK Grant StClair-Armstrong[a] 7,668 14.1 N/A
Liberal Democrats Smita Rajesh 6,055 11.1 −8.6
Green Edward Gildea 2,846 5.2 +0.4
To save serious money on pensions, tax relief is the place to look, not the triple lock.
PS: Stop buying their crap weapons and build our own across Europe. Poke the feckers right in the eye.
Pre-1967 the Palestinians lived in Egypt and Jordan, their returning to Egypt and Jordan albeit in their current borders might be a solution to end eternal conflict.
And for all the talk about how collective punishment is not justified, its happened many times before, including for example Germans being kicked out of areas they were no longer welcome in post-WWII.
He surely understands now that Donald was playing him all along?
Everton 1 - 2 Liverpool
Get in!
You're wasting your time.
After three minutes of 'reasoning' it told me to take all my holidays in one block from mid-November until Christmas.
Still, a sinner repented, and all that.
We should chuck the f**kers out of chagos base and rent it to China